System.Net.HttpListenerContext Class

The HttpListenerContext class provides access to request and response information used by the HttpListener class to process HTTP requests.

Overview

Authors

Syntax

public sealed class HttpListenerContext

Inheritance

System.Object → System.Net.HttpListenerContext

Microsoft

Properties

Name	Type	Description
`Request`	`HttpListenerRequest`	Gets the request object that contains information about the client's request.
`Response`	`HttpListenerResponse`	Gets the response object used to construct and send a response to the client.
`User`	`IPrincipal`	Gets or sets the authenticated user for this request.
`Connection`	`HttpListenerConnection`	Provides details about the underlying TCP connection.

Methods

Name	Returns	Description
`Abort()`	void	Immediately aborts processing of the request and closes the connection.
`Close()`	void	Finishes response processing and releases resources.

Remarks

The HttpListenerContext instance is created each time HttpListener.GetContext() or HttpListener.BeginGetContext() returns a new request. It encapsulates both the incoming request and the outgoing response, making it easier to handle them together.

Typical usage involves reading from Request.InputStream and writing to Response.OutputStream. Be sure to close or dispose the streams when finished to free the underlying network resources.

Example

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

class SimpleServer
{
    static void Main()
    {
        var listener = new HttpListener();
        listener.Prefixes.Add("http://localhost:8080/");
        listener.Start();
        Console.WriteLine("Listening...");
        while (true)
        {
            var context = listener.GetContext(); // HttpListenerContext
            var request = context.Request;
            var response = context.Response;
            string responseString = $"<html><body>Hello from {request.Url}</body></html>";
            byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseString);
            response.ContentLength64 = buffer.Length;
            response.OutputStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
            response.OutputStream.Close();
        }
    }
}

.NET API Reference