title: Silently authenticate to a URL via basic auth in C#
body: <p>I need to build a C# application which accepts a specific URL as input and loads the webpage (which is all text) into a string.  The difficulty is that this URL requires basic authentication in order to load the page.  I need to hard-code the credentials into the app; I can't have the user enter it themselves.  I don't believe it is possible to pass the username &amp; p/w in as part of the URL.  Is there a way to handle this silently with C#?</p>
  
  <p>Here is how, in very basic terms, I would load the page if authentication wasn't required:</p>
  
  <pre><code>static void Main(string[] args)
  {
      if (args.Length == 0)
          return;
  
      WebClient webclient = new WebClient();
      string output = webclient.DownloadString(args[0]);
      Console.WriteLine(output);
  }
  </code></pre>