The WebClient is a standard .NET class, Gene probably makes use of it in his NetHelper Class.
Here is a simple example:
// declare the URL we want to scrape
string url = "http://www.homegenie.it/";
string webresult;
using (System.Net.WebClient client = new System.Net.WebClient())
{
// populate webresult with the contents of the website
webresult = client.DownloadString(url);
}
// Test. Count the number of characters in the string
Program.Notify("result length", webresult.Length.ToString());
The string 'webresult' contains the HTML content of the given website. At the end I just display a count of all the characters to see if something has been retrieved.