Setting the User-Agent header for a WebClient request

I found that the WebClient kept removing my User-Agent header after one request and I was tired of setting it each time. I used a hack to set the User-Agent permanently by making my own custom WebClient and overriding the GetWebRequest method. Hope this helps.

public class CustomWebClient : WebClient
{
    public CustomWebClient(){}

    protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri address)
    {
        var request = base.GetWebRequest(address) as HttpWebRequest;
        request.UserAgent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0;)";

        //... your other custom code...

        return request;
    }
}

You can check the WebClient documentation for a C# sample that adds a User-Agent to your WebClient and here for a sample for Windows Phone.

This is the sample for C#:

WebClient client = new WebClient ();

// Add a user agent header in case the 
// requested URI contains a query.

client.Headers.Add ("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; " + 
                                  "Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");

This is a sample for Windows Phone (Silverlight):

request.Headers["UserAgent"] = "appname";
// OR
request.UserAgent = "appname";