Screen Scraping Web Forms Content with System.Net.WebClient

Sometimes you may have the need for accessing html web content from within an application. Why would you need to do this? Well, suppose you need to have a Windows Service periodically render a page with dynamic content and attach it to an email. Your application would need a way to request and save the remote page. Perhaps you need to grab an image from a web camera and save it to a file or display it in a Picture Box within a Winforms application. This technique, often called “Screen Scraping” is simple (like so many other thing) with .NET. In fact, 4GuysFromRolla.com have a good article describing how to do just this: Screen Scrapes in ASP.NET. As they describe, with a few lines of code, you can request an Internet resource and work with it’s stream.