New StackOverflow Notifier Released

This is a maintenance release until I finish the new features I’ve promised.

Changes:

• Added Proxy Support so that users behind firewall can use SO-Notifier.
• I’ve done a few changes to reduce the bandwidth overhead of the application.

As suggested by Jeff Atwood I’m using gzip http header specified to reduce network bandwidth.

It took me a while to discover how to it. Finally I came up with this code to retrieve the user web page:

public static string GetStringFromURL(string urlString, IWebProxy proxy)
{
var dataRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(urlString);
dataRequest.Timeout = 15000;

dataRequest.Proxy = proxy;

dataRequest.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptEncoding, “gzip,deflate”);

using (var dataResponse = (HttpWebResponse)dataRequest.GetResponse())
{
    var responseStream = dataResponse.GetResponseStream();

    if (dataResponse.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains(“gzip”))
    {
        responseStream = new GZipStream(responseStream, CompressionMode.Decompress);
    }
    else if (dataResponse.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains(“deflate”))
    {
        responseStream = new DeflateStream(responseStream, CompressionMode.Decompress);
    }

    var Reader = new StreamReader(responseStream, Encoding.Default);
    var result = Reader.ReadToEnd();

    responseStream.Close();

    return result;
}

That’s it for now. You can download the new release from its Codeplex site – let me know what you think.