Sending HTTP POST with System.Net.WebClient

Based on @carlosfigueira ‘s answer, I looked further into WebClient’s methods and found UploadValues, which is exactly what I want:

Using client As New Net.WebClient
    Dim reqparm As New Specialized.NameValueCollection
    reqparm.Add("param1", "somevalue")
    reqparm.Add("param2", "othervalue")
    Dim responsebytes = client.UploadValues(someurl, "POST", reqparm)
    Dim responsebody = (New Text.UTF8Encoding).GetString(responsebytes)
End Using

The key part is this:

client.UploadValues(someurl, "POST", reqparm)

It sends whatever verb I type in, and it also helps me create a properly url encoded form data, I just have to supply the parameters as a namevaluecollection.