This is a common question in StackOverflow and MSDN forums. So, let’s take a look at the main options.

Contents

HttpStringContent

Send a string:

// E.g. a JSON string

HttpStringContent stringContent = new HttpStringContent(
    "{ \"firstName\": \"John\" }",
    UnicodeEncoding.Utf8,
    "application/json");

HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(
    uri,
    stringContent);

This sends a POST request like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Length: 23
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Host: kiewic.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

{ "firstName": "John" }

See here examples of how to serialize or parse JSON content on Windows Universal apps.

HttpFormUrlEncodedContent

Send a list of key-value pairs, better known as x-www-form-urlencoded:

Dictionary<string, string> pairs = new Dictionary<string,string>();
pairs.Add("Name", "Bob");
pairs.Add("Age", "18");
pairs.Add("Gender", "Male");
HttpFormUrlEncodedContent formContent =
    new HttpFormUrlEncodedContent(pairs);
 
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(uri, formContent);

This sends a POST request like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Length: 27
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Host: kiewic.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

Name=Bob&Age=18&Gender=Male

This is equivalent to submitting the following HTML form from a web browser:

<form action="http://kiewic.com/" method="post">
    <input name="Name" type="text" value="Bob" />
    <input name="Age" type="text" value="18" />
    <input name="Gender" type="text" value="Male" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

The list of key-value pairs can be accessed from PHP using the $_POST array, or from ASP.NET using the Request.Form property.

HttpMultipartFormDataContent

Send files, or a mix of text and files, better known as multipart/form-data.

First, create a sample file:

IStorageFolder folder = ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder;
IStorageFile file = await folder.CreateFileAsync(
    "foo.txt",
    CreationCollisionOption.ReplaceExisting);
await FileIO.WriteTextAsync(
    file,
    "The quick brown fox jumps ...");

Then, send a request like this:

IInputStream inputStream = await file.OpenAsync(FileAccessMode.Read);

HttpMultipartFormDataContent multipartContent =
    new HttpMultipartFormDataContent();

multipartContent.Add(
    new HttpStreamContent(inputStream),
    "myFile",
    file.Name);
    
multipartContent.Add(
    new HttpStringContent("Hello World"),
    "myText");
 
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(
    uri,
    multipartContent);

The raw POST request looks like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Length: 371
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=c9b47f5b-ca6c-43bd-a953-6ea78b2ee24b
Host: kiewic.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

--c9b47f5b-ca6c-43bd-a953-6ea78b2ee24b
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="foo.txt"; filename*=UTF-8''foo.txt

The quick brown fox jumps ...
--c9b47f5b-ca6c-43bd-a953-6ea78b2ee24b
Content-Length: 11
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myText"

Hello World
--c9b47f5b-ca6c-43bd-a953-6ea78b2ee24b--

Notice that HttpClient encodes attachment file names using RFC 2047 to support file names with non-ASCII characters:

filename*=UTF-8''foo.txt

This is equivalent to submitting the following HTML form from a web browser:

<form action="http://kiewic.com/" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    <p><input name="myFile" type="file" /></p>
    <p><input name="myText" type="text" value="Hello World" /></p>
    <p><input type="submit" /></p>
</form>

The files can be accessed from PHP using the $_FILES array, or from ASP.NET using the Request.Files property.

HttpBufferContent

HttpBufferContent is similar to HttpStringContent, however in this case, the content does not necessarily need to be a string, it can be a binary file or any sequence of bytes.

IBuffer buffer = new byte[] { 0x1, 0x2, 0x3 }.AsBuffer();

HttpBufferContent content = new HttpBufferContent(buffer);
content.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/octet-stream");

HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(uri, content);

The raw POST request looks like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Length: 3
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Host: localhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

<0x01><0x02><0x03>

In PHP you can read the content with file_get_contents(“php://input”). In ASP.NET with Request.InputStream.