This article shows how to use the Ping and PingReply classes in a C# Forms application.

Unlike most ping utilities, this one is intended to notify us when a ping is successful, but this sample can easily be modified to notify us when a ping fails. This sample also shows use of a timer control in a form and of toggling a ToolStripMenuItem.

Most ping utilities are intended to notify us when something has stopped working. I wrote this utility because I needed something to notify me when my host has started working. This sample can certainly be used in a utility that does the reverse; that is, does something when a host stops responding.

In the sample program, there is a TextBox for a host and a TextBox for an interval of time in seconds. There are three output TextBoxes; one for the time of the last ping, one for the status of the ping and a third for an error message. The one for the time of the last ping is more for diagnostic purposes and is not really useful otherwise.

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Ping and PingReply Classes

The Ping class can be very easy to use. The following is a simplified version of what the sample does.

const int Timeout = 120;
String Data = "[012345678901234567890123456789]";
byte[] Buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Data);
Ping Sender = new Ping();
PingReply Reply = Sender.Send(Host, Timeout, Buffer);

The PingReply.Status field will be either IPStatus.Success or one of many values indicating a problem. The PingReply.RoundtripTime Property is another useful item to show.