WebException and the HttpWebResponse

The following code is used to make a request and get the results:

HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://bbrown.info/");
HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream());
string contents = reader.ReadToEnd();
resp.Close();<p>contents will contain the HTML of this blog if the server gives a 200 OK response. Anything else will throw a WebException. You can wrap the snippet above in a try-catch to handle a non-200, but the exception is thrown in the GetResponse call so you get nothing from the actual response. 404? May as well be a 500.</p><p>Today I discovered that the WebException itself has two properties: Response and Status. This Response is the same as the resp above so you can extract out the server response in the catch.</p><p>This whole behavior of HttpWebRequest is counterintuitive in the sense that a non-200 is not an exceptional circumstance; I would have expected the response to be accessible and the status code to be populated.</p>