Question

I have a code to retrieve an XML file from the site, so I do as follows:

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "GET";
request.ContentType = "text/xml";

using (WebResponse webResponse = request.GetResponse())
{
    using (Stream responseStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream())
    {
       if (responseStream != null)
        {
            reportXML = XDocument.Load(responseStream.ToString());
        }
    }
    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(@"C:\Retrieved.xml"))
    {
        reportXML.Save(writer);
    }
 }

But I debugged the app and it seems I lose everything on this line of code, so I have nothing anymore to save.

Stream responseStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream())

Any idea why it could be?

If I investigate the object I see this:

Length = ‘responseStream.Length’ threw an exception of type
‘System.NotSupportedException’

And the error is following:

Could not find file ‘C:\Documents and Settings\user\My
Documents\Visual Studio
2010\Projects\Proto\App\bin\Debug\System.Net.ConnectStream’.

Answer 1

This is the problem:

reportXML = XDocument.Load(responseStream.ToString());

Calling ToString() on a stream like that is pretty much never going to give you anything useful. If you just want to load the contents of the stream, get rid of the ToString call:

reportXML = XDocument.Load(responseStream);

Alternatively, if you really just want to save it to disk, simply use Stream.CopyTo and don’t bother parsing it as XML in the first place.