C# 0 The Complete Reference

int

, which must be cast to 

char

. It returns –1 when 

the end of the stream has been reached.

Finally, the response is closed by calling 

Close( )

 on 

resp

. Closing the response stream 

automatically closes the input stream, too. It is important to close the response between 

each request. If you don’t, it is possible to exhaust the network resources and prevent the 

next connection.

Before leaving this example, one other important point needs to be made: It was not 

actually necessary to use an 

HttpWebRequest

 or 

HttpWebResponse

 object to display the 

hypertext received from the server. Because the preceding program did not use any HTTP-

specific features, the standard methods defined by 

WebRequest

 and 

WebResponse

 were 

sufficient to handle this task. Thus, the calls to