How to change the timeout on a .NET WebClient obje

Question

I am trying to download a client's data to my local machine (programatically) and their webserver is very, very slow which is causing a timeout in my WebClient object.

Here is my code:

WebClient webClient = new WebClient();

webClient.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
webClient.DownloadFile(downloadUrl, downloadFile);

Is there a way to set an infinite timeout on this object? Or if not can anyone help me with an example on an alternate way to do this?

The URL works fine in a browser - it just takes about 3 minutes to show.

Answer 1

You need to use HttpWebRequest rather than WebClient as you can't set the timeout on WebClient without extending it (even though it uses the HttpWebRequest). Using the HttpWebRequest instead will allow you to set the timeout.