I thought that I had replied again to this thread but apparently not. You seem to be under the impression that writing to the request stream is sending data to the server. It's not. You've accomplished nothing by using an Encoding object to convert the String to a Byte array because that's exactly what a SteramWriter does internally anyway. If you want to actually send the data to the server then you have to execute the request, which you do by calling GetResponse. I'd be surprised if any example of using an HttpWebRequest didn't include a call to GetResponse.