Lately I ranted a bit about the responsibility of community leaders, to not present totally crappy code, at least not without a disclaimer.

 

This is a better way of doing that. Another great post from Mike.

 

I might have also try-catch-ed the 

(HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url)
bit, but anyway that's good code for people to copy&paste into their project without leaving HttpWebResponses and other Streams in danger of hanging loose.