Using the Ping class

The Ping class is new to .NET 2.0 and it let’s you ping remote addresses much the same way as the ping.exe command line tool does. It’s a great way to check the availability of different kinds of remote servers over the network in a very low cost and fast way. The most important result a ping can give you is the ping time. The ping time gives you an indication on the network speed between you and the server.

I’ve written a very small and easy to use method that returns the ping time of a given URL.

using System.Net.NetworkInformation;

/// <summary>

/// Pings the specified URL within the timeout period.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="url">The URL to ping.</param>

/// <param name="timeout">Number of milliseconds.</param>

/// <returns>Returns the ping time in milliseconds.</returns>

private static long PingTime(string url, int timeout)

{

  try

  {

    using (Ping ping = new Ping ())

    {

      PingReply reply = ping.Send(url, timeout);

      return reply.RoundtripTime;

    }

  }

  catch (System.Net.Sockets.SocketException)

  {

    return -1;

  }

}

You can use the method from whenever you want like the following an ASP.NET webpage.

Response.Write(PingTime("http://www.google.com", 2000));