StreaminganImagefromaURL

Streaming an Image from a URL

Streaming an image from the internet is extremely easy in C#

First off we need to include a set of assemblies in our project:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Collections;
using System.Net;
using System.Web;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

Function Declaration:

Image GetImageFromURL(string strURL)

Parameters: string strURL - the url of the image to download

Image GetImageFromURL(string strURL)
{

Initialize the return value

    Image retVal = null;

Any errror while connecting to the server or streaming the data into an image can result in an exception! dont forget to use a try{}catch{} block!

    try
    {

We use the HttpWebRequest object to connect to a web site:

        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(strURL);

Be sure to populate the time out values in the request :)

        request.Timeout = 5000; // 5 seconds in milliseconds
        request.ReadWriteTimeout = 20000; // allow up to 20 seconds to elapse

Retrieving the stream of data from the web server is very easy:

        // execute the request
        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)
            request.GetResponse();

Now we convert the downloaded stream into an Image!

        retVal = Image.FromStream(streamThreadStream);
    }

Perform cleanup on an exception:

    catch(Exception)
    {
        retVal = null;
    }

Thats it! now we return the image :)

    return retVal;
}