How To Get Past 401?

How to ignore 401 unauthorized error from webrequest to get website status

• I am writing an application to check the status of some internal web applications. Some of these applications use Windows authentication. When I use this code to check the status, it throws The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.. Which is understandable because I haven't provided any credentials to the webiste so I am not authorized. WebResponse objResponse = null; WebRequest objRequest = HttpWebRequest.Create(website); objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse(); Is there a way to ignore the 401 error without doing something like this? WebRequest objRequest = HttpWebRequest.Create(website); try { objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse(); } catch (WebException ex) { //Catch and ignore 401 Unauthorized errors because this means the site is up, the app just doesn't have authorization to use it. if (!ex.Message.Contains("The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.")) { throw; } }

• Answer:

  When the server is down or unreachable you will get a timeout exception. I know that the only way to handle that is with a try/catch. I'm quite sure this is the case for most errors (401/404/501), so: No, you can't ignore (prevent) the exceptions but you will have to handle them. They are the only way to get most of the StatusCodes your App is looking for.