VB .NET Comnectivity check and error handling

[alecsillidan]

Hello again.
I'm working on a project and I need to check if the computer has internet access.
The Network.IsAvailable is not good for the project since many computers connect through routers and some routers might not be connected.
I tried with the Ping method, if it's connected it works fine, but i'm getting an unhandled exception "cannot connect to host" if not connected.

My question is: how can I check if the computer is connected and when it is online to start executing the rest of the code.
Also, how can I disable unhandled exceptions? If an exception occurs then the program continues executing without error or "not responding".

Thank you!

[BC_Programmer]

use Ping. The way to "disable" unhandled exceptions is to handle them.

[BC_Programmer]

Another option: since ping only really tests if a machine is responding and doesn't always correspond with the availability of HTTP requests, we can do the same thing that win Vista/7 do to check the network connection:

Code: [Select]

public bool ConnectionAvailable()
        {
            try
            {
                var result = new WebClient().DownloadString("http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt");
                return true;

            }
            catch (Exception exx)
            {
                return false;
            }
           

        }

Which I think would translate to something like the following for VB.NET:

Code: [Select]

Public Function ConnectionAvailable() As Boolean
Try
    Dim Result As String = (new WebClient).DownloadString("http://msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt")
    return true
Catch exx As Exception
    return false
End Try
End Function