WebRequest "HEAD" light weight alternative

Question

I recently discovered that the following does not work with certain sites, such as IMDB.com.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                System.Net.WebRequest wc = System.Net.WebRequest.Create("http://www.imdb.com"); //args[0]);

                ((HttpWebRequest)wc).UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.153.1 Safari/525.19";
                wc.Timeout = 1000;
                wc.Method = "HEAD";
                WebResponse res = wc.GetResponse();
                var streamReader = new System.IO.StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream());

                Console.WriteLine(streamReader.ReadToEnd());
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }
        }
    }

It returns an HTTP 405 ( Method Not Allowed ). My problem is, I use code very similar to the above to check if a link is valid and the vast majority of times it works correctly. I can switch it to method equal GET and it works ( with an increase in timeout ), but this slows things down by an order of magnitude. I am assuming the 405 response is a server configuration on IMDB's server side.

Is there a way for me to do the same thing as above, in a light weight manner in .NET? Or, is there a way to fix the above code so it works as a GET request that works with imdb?

Answer 1

You'll have to clarify what you mean by "lightweight". What are you trying to accomplish?

Whether or not you can use GET/POST/HEAD/DELETE/etc will depend on the URL and what's configured in the application that is running on the server at that URL.

If all you're trying to do is see if you can make a connection without actually downloading the content you could maybe try just initiating a connection to port 80 using sockets, but there isn't really reliable or universally supported way just by changing the HTTP method.