Why am I getting "(304) Not Modified" error on some links when using HttpWebRequest?

First, this is not an error. The 3xx denotes a redirection. The real errors are 4xx (client error) and 5xx (server error).

If a client gets a 304 Not Modified, then it's the client's responsibility to display the resouce in question from its own cache. In general, the proxy shouldn't worry about this. It's just the messenger.

This is intended behavior.

When you make an HTTP request, the server normally returns code 200 OK. If you set If-Modified-Since, the server may return 304 Not modified (and the response will not have the content). This is supposed to be your cue that the page has not been modified.

The authors of the class have foolishly decided that 304 should be treated as an error and throw an exception. Now you have to clean up after them by catching the exception every time you try to use If-Modified-Since.

Just pressing F5 is not always working.

why?

Because your ISP is also caching web data for you.

Solution: Force Refresh.

Force refresh your browser by pressing CTRL + F5 in Firefox or Chrome to clear ISP cache too, instead of just pressing F5

You then can see 200 response instead of 304 in the browser F12 developer tools network tab.

Another trick is to add question mark ? at the end of the URL string of the requested page:

http://localhost:52199/Customers/Create?

The question mark will ensure that the browser refresh the request without caching any previous requests.

Additionally in Visual Studio you can set the default browser to Chrome in Incognito mode to avoid cache issues while developing, by adding Chrome in Incognito mode as default browser, see the steps (self illustrated):