How to read and use the contents of a website from Powershell?

First we need to create a xmlhttp object, similar to what you would do in JavaScript

$objXmlHttp = New-Object -ComObject MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP

Use the open method to specify the url, optional username and password. The third parameter (optional) is a boolean indicator of whether the call is asynchronous – the default is true.

$objXmlHttp.Open("GET", "http://www.normanbauer.com", $False, "username", "password")
$objXmlHttp.Send()

Now we can work with the results

$content = $objXmlHttp.responseText
$status = $objXmlHttp.status
$statustext =$objXmlHttp.statusText