Q:

How can I make an application in c# collect data from a website?

First of all, I hope my question doesn't bother you. I really need to get and idea of how I can accomplish that, but unfortunatelly, I'm really a beginner, I'm crawling when it comes to programming. I'm struggling to learn it the best way I can. I'll thank you for any help you give me. 
Here's the task: I was ordered to find a way to collect some data from a website using a c# application. This will be done everyday, in order to update the data which we'll use to calculate some financial index.
I know my question might sound vague, anyway, even telling me how I can be more precise will help me. I know I seem to know desperate, but putting appart all the personell issues, my scholarship kind of depends on it.
Thanks in advance! (Please, don't mind the bad English, I'm brasilian and my English might not be that good yet.) 

A:

First, your English is fine.  In fact, I thought you were a native speaker until you said otherwise.
The term you're looking for is 'site scraping'.  Observe this question:  Options for HTML scraping?.  The second answer points to an HTML agility pack library you can use.
Now, there are two possibilities here.  The first is you have to parse the HTML and scrape your data out of it.  This is more computationally intensive and depends on the layout of the page.  If they change the way the site looks, it could break the scraper.
The second possibility is they provide some XML or JSON web service you can consume.  In this case you aren't scraping anything, but are rather using a true data feed.  If the layout of the site changes, you will not break.  Whether your target site supports this form of data feed is up to the site.

