Question

I was wondering if you could disable Web Exceptions, for example,

404 Not Found

Answer 1

You don’t disable WebExceptions. Like most other exceptions, their whole point is to signal a problem that’s not fixable at the point where it happened. You can’t just ignore that and expect your app to work.

What you do is catch and handle the exception. Like so.

Try
    Dim response = request.GetResponse()

    '... do stuff with response here ...

Catch ex as WebException
    ' Note, `response` probably isn't usable here!  Pretty sure it's
    ' out of scope.  In any case, if `GetResponse` is throwing the
    ' exception, then it didn't return a value.  However, you should be
    ' able to access `ex.Response` to get info about the response,
    ' including the HTTP response code.
    Dim errorResponse = CType(ex.Response, HttpWebResponse)
    If errorResponse.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound Then

        '... handle error ...

    Else
        ' if it's not a 404, we're not doing anything about the exception
        ' so rethrow it
        Throw
    End If
End Try

' Note, `response` is out of scope here!