Question

I am working on porting an application from WPF to a Windows 8 App.

I would like to know if there is a similar functionality like System.Net.WebClient.UploadString in System.Net.Http.HttpClient namespace (since System.Net.WebClient isn’t available in WinRT) If yes an example is greatly appreciated! If not is there any alternative?

On the side note I was able to convert WebClient.DownloadString to its equivalent using System.Net.Http.HttpClient namespace with the help of Morten Nielsen post here http://www.sharpgis.net/post/2011/10/05/WinRT-vs-Silverlight-Part-7-Making-WebRequests.aspx

Answer 1

Yes, you would use the PostAsync method.

The method takes either a Uri or a string (just like the UploadString method on the WebClient class) as well as an HttpContent instance.

The HttpContent instance is meant to be agnostic to different types of content, allowing you to specify not only the mechanism by which you provide the content (ByteArrayContent for an array of bytes, StreamContent for a Stream, etc.) but the structure as well (MultipartFormDataContent).

That said, there is also a StringContent class which will send the string, like so:

// The content.
string post = “your content to post”;

// The client.
using (client = new HttpClient());
{
    // Post.
    // Let's assume you're in an async method.
    HttpResponseMessage response = await client.Post(
        "http://yourdomain/post", new StringContent(post));

    // Do something with the response.
}

If you need to specify an Encoding, there’s a constructor that takes an Encoding, which you would use like this:

// The client.
using (client = new HttpClient());
{
    // Post.
    // Let's assume you're in an async method.
    HttpResponseMessage response = await client.Post(
        "http://yourdomain/post", new StringContent(post),
         Encoding.ASCII);

    // Do something with the response.
}

From there, it’s a matter of processing the HttpResponseMessage (if that’s important to you, if it’s not a one-way operation) when the response is sent.