HttpWebResponse - disposing of a connection properly

Question

I'm working on a download manager in C# and I'm making using of multiple http requests and was wondering how can one make sure a connection properly closed?

Is it enough to call Dispose on the response stream? Do I need to call Close as well? Not sure where things could possibly could go wrong but at some point a web site would become unresponsive.

Thanks!

Aback

Answer 1

Wrap your HttpWebResponse in a using block:

using(HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
{
    // do stuff here
} // response object is automatically disposed of here. 

Siderolite

I'm familiar with the using statement but I'm already calling Dispose() after I'm done, is that any difference? – Aback

When you use using like this, you don't need to worry about calling Dispose yourself, the compiler takes care of it for you. – Siderolite

Answer 2

As Kyle mentioned, wrap your HttpWebResponse in a using block. But if GetResponse() throws an exception (which happens on a 404 response, for instance), you need to grab the HttpWebResponse in the exception.

HttpWebResponse webResponse = null;
try {
    webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
} catch (WebException e) {
    webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)e.Response;
    if (webResponse == null) {
        // Handle this.
    }
}    
using (webResponse) {
    // Process the response.
}

Wirephoto