Question

I’d like to execute an HttpWebRequest in a separate thread.

For example I have:

public string GetPage(string url)
{
    string html = new WebClient().DownloadString(url);
    return html;
}

How would I run this in a separate thread without much hassle?

I have tried starting a simple thread but I have no idea how to return the HTML.

Answer 1

To do it “without much hassle”, use c# 5.0

public async void DoWork(string url)
{
    string page = await new WebClient().DownloadStringTaskAsync(url);
    //Caller thread will not be blocked but you will be able to
    //continue your work at this point after BG thread 
    //(executing "DownloadStringTaskAsync") has downloaded the page

}