Compact Framework - Upload file via REST - rest

Question

I am looking for the best way to transfer files from the compact framework to a server via REST. I have a web service I created using .net Web API. I've looked at several SO questions and other sites that dealt with sending files, but none of them seem to work the for what I need.
I am trying to send media files from WM 6 and 6.5 devices to my REST service. While most of the files are less than 300k, an odd few may be 2-10 or so megabytes. Does anyone have some snippets I could use to make this work?
Thanks!

Answer 1

I think this is the minimum for sending a file:
using (var fileStream = File.Open(#"\file.txt", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
{
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.destination.com/path");
request.Method = "POST"; // or PUT, depending on what the server expects
request.ContentLength = fileStream.Length; // see the note below
using (var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
int bytes;
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; // any reasonable buffer size will do
while ((bytes = fileStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
requestStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytes);
}
}
try
{
using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
{
}
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
// failure
}
}
Note: HTTP needs a way to know when you're "done" sending data. There are three ways to achieve this:
Set request.ContentLength as used in the example, because we know the size of the file before sending anything
Set request.SendChunked, to send chunks of data including their individual size
You could also set request.AllowWriteStreamBuffering to write to an in-memory buffer, but I wouldn't recommend wasting that much memory on the compact framework.