I had a simple piece of code to grab an RSS feed from another site, and display it formatted the way I wanted. I used caching, and it worked well on my develepment server.
When deploying to the client's server, it no longer worked. I did some digging and found out that I'd have to use a proxy. No big deal, just a few lines of code. I really didn't like have to add code, and have a setting to disable it, or use a different proxy, or whatever.
Then I discovered, I didn't need to change the code. Everything in the System.Net namespace can be configured to use a proxy in the web.config file. I just added these few lines:
<system.net>
<defaultProxy>
<proxy
usesystemdefault="False"
proxyaddress="http://theproxy"
bypassonlocal="True"
/>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>