What is the best way to check for Internet connect

Question

What is the fastest and most efficient way to check for Internet connectivity in .NET?

Answer 1

I personally find the answer of Anton and moffeltje best, but I added a check to exclude virtual networks set up by VMWare and others.

public static bool IsAvailableNetworkActive()
{
    // only recognizes changes related to Internet adapters
    if (!System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable()) return false;

    // however, this will include all adapters -- filter by opstatus and activity
    NetworkInterface[] interfaces = System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces();
    return (from face in interfaces
            where face.OperationalStatus == OperationalStatus.Up
            where (face.NetworkInterfaceType != NetworkInterfaceType.Tunnel) && (face.NetworkInterfaceType != NetworkInterfaceType.Loopback)
            where (!(face.Name.ToLower().Contains("virtual") || face.Description.ToLower().Contains("virtual")))
            select face.GetIPv4Statistics()).Any(statistics => (statistics.BytesReceived > 0) && (statistics.BytesSent > 0));
}

Answer 2

public static bool Isconnected = false;

public static bool CheckForInternetConnection()
{
    try
    {
        Ping myPing = new Ping();
        String host = "google.com";
        byte[] buffer = new byte[32];
        int timeout = 1000;
        PingOptions pingOptions = new PingOptions();
        PingReply reply = myPing.Send(host, timeout, buffer, pingOptions);
        if (reply.Status == IPStatus.Success)
        {
            return true;
        }
        else if (reply.Status == IPStatus.TimedOut)
        {
            return Isconnected;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
        return false;
    }
}

public static void CheckConnection()
{
    if (CheckForInternetConnection())
    {
        Isconnected = true;
    }
    else
    {
        Isconnected = false;
    }
}

Answer 3

NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable is very unreliable. Just have some VMware or other LAN connection and it will return wrong result. Also about Dns.GetHostEntry method I were just concerned about whether test URL might be blocked in the environment where my application going to deploy.

So another way I found out is using InternetGetConnectedState method. My code is

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("wininet.dll")]
private extern static bool InternetGetConnectedState(out int Description, int ReservedValue);

public static bool CheckNet()
{
     int desc;
     return InternetGetConnectedState(out desc, 0);         
}

Answer 4

Here's how it is implemented in Android.

As a proof of concept, I translated this code to C#:

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://g.cn/generate_204");
request.UserAgent = "Android";
request.KeepAlive = false;
request.Timeout = 1500;

using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
{
    if (response.ContentLength == 0 && response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.NoContent)
    {
        //Connection to internet available
    }
    else
    {
        //Connection to internet not available
    }
}

Answer 5

There is absolutely no way you can reliably check if there is an internet connection or not (I assume you mean access to the internet).

You can, however, request resources that are virtually never offline, like pinging google.com or something similar. I think this would be efficient.

try { 
    Ping myPing = new Ping();
    String host = "google.com";
    byte[] buffer = new byte[32];
    int timeout = 1000;
    PingOptions pingOptions = new PingOptions();
    PingReply reply = myPing.Send(host, timeout, buffer, pingOptions);
    return (reply.Status == IPStatus.Success);
}
catch (Exception) {
    return false;
}