Pure Sockets vs WebBrowser vs Other?

[Curt Lockman]

I'm well versed in VB6 and want to get back into coding, I have Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Basic .NET looks great. Most of my apps are HTTP based and I always used winsock just because it was so much faster and cleaner than the WB control but now I'm converting some old apps and I'm wondering, is it really worth parsing everything and writing custom functions all the time when the WB control is so easy and convenient?

 

[Roderick Mitchell]

the web browser control is bloated, buggy, inefficient, doesn't do multi-threading, and does a piss poor job using proxies.

the System.Net.Sockets namespace is where it's really at, but if you don't feel like going there you can get by with HTTPWebRequest. HTTPWebRequest isn't nearly as solid, fast, stable, or flexible as the sockets namespace, but it is light years better than the web browser control.

-edit-

i have some fairly detailed posts on the difference between the three of these and some very good links to help get you started. just search for other posts by me.