HTTP over C# sockets

Question

I am trying to send HTTP request and recieve responce from the server over C# sockets, and i'm new with this language.

I've wrote following code (IP resolved correctly):

IPEndPoint RHost = new IPEndPoint(IP, Port);
Socket socket = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
socket.Connect(RHost);

String HTTPRequestHeaders_String = "GET ?q=fdgdfg HTTP/1.0
Host: google.com
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.205 Safari/534.16
Referer: http://google.com/";

MessageBox.Show(HTTPRequestHeaders_String, "Request");

byte[] HTTPRequestHeaders = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(HTTPRequestHeaders_String);
socket.Send(HTTPRequestHeaders, SocketFlags.None);

String Response = "";
byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) socket.ReceiveBufferSize];

int bytes;
do
{
    // On this lane program stops to react
    bytes = socket.Receive(buffer);
    // This line cannot be reached, tested with breakpoint
    Response += Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer, 0, bytes);
}
while (bytes >= 0);

MessageBox.Show(Response, "Response");

What am i doing wrong? I need just to load full HTML of page, or at least few characters from response (i cant do even this).

Answer 1

var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
Stream responseStream = webClient.OpenRead("http://www.google.com");
if (responseStream != null)
{
   var responseReader = new StreamReader(responseStream);
   string response = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
   MessageBox.Show(response);
}

Answer 2

I would suggest looking into the protocol itself if you want to do this raw, http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.0/spec.html#Request

And try sending the CRLF to terminate the request ;)

Answer 3

There is the TcpClient class which on one hand allows you to have a full control over the request (you create request body as string) and on the other hand is much simpler to use than a low-level socket.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.tcpclient.aspx

Answer 4

I found the Mentalis Proxy to be extremely helpful in understanding the Http Request/Response cycle at a socket level: http://www.mentalis.org/soft/projects/proxy/