Question

I ran a console application yesterday to send and receive web request and web response and it works fine. Today I’m testing the same method on my form application and I get the error WebRequest Does Not Contain A Definition For Create. All my imports are the same. It’s a bit strange and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. This is the code to my console application:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using HtmlAgilityPack;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace WebrequestCsharp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            StreamWriter sw;
            sw = File.AppendText("c:\\Temp\\webresponse.txt");
            //Create a Web-Request to an URL
            HttpWebRequest HWR_Request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.hitta.se/ericsson/företag_och_personer");

            //Send Web-Request and receive a Web-Response
            HttpWebResponse HWR_Response = (HttpWebResponse)HWR_Request.GetResponse();

            //Translate data from the Web-Response to a string
            Stream S_DataStream = HWR_Response.GetResponseStream();
            StreamReader SR_DataStream = new StreamReader(S_DataStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            string s_ResponseString = SR_DataStream.ReadToEnd();
            S_DataStream.Close();
            sw.WriteLine(s_ResponseString);
            sw.Flush();
            sw.Close();

            HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
            doc.Load("c:\\Temp\\webresponse.txt");
            Console.ReadKey();
        }


    }
}

And this is my form application that cannot accept my Create:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using HtmlAgilityPack;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace PhoneFind
{
    class WebRequest
    {
        private String url { get; set; }
        private String searchEngine { get; set; }
        HttpWebRequest HWR_Request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.hitta.se/ericsson/företag_och_personer");
        public WebRequest(String url, String searchEngine)
        {
            this.url = url;
            this.searchEngine = searchEngine;
        }

        // sends a request to the search engine 
        public String sendRequest(String url, String searchEngine)
        {
            switch (searchEngine){
                case "hitta":
                    //Create a Web-Request to a URL

                    //Send Web-Request and receive a Web-Response
                    HttpWebResponse HWR_Response = (HttpWebResponse)HWR_Request.GetResponse();

                    //Translate data from the Web-Response to a string
                    Stream S_DataStream = HWR_Response.GetResponseStream();
                    StreamReader SR_DataStream = new StreamReader(S_DataStream, Encoding.UTF8);
                    string s_ResponseString = SR_DataStream.ReadToEnd();
                    S_DataStream.Close();
                    break;
            }
            return "";

        }

    }
}

Answer 1

In your form application, your class is named WebRequest, so the compiler is looking for a Create method in that class, rather that System.Net.WebRequest class. In order to resolve this, fully qualify the WebRequest in System.Net:

HttpWebRequest HWR_Request = (HttpWebRequest)System.Net.WebRequest.Create("http://www.hitta.se/ericsson/företag_och_personer");

Thanks to Amiram for clarifying that it wasn’t an ambiguous name conflict as I originally thought it might be.