SmartPing

A slightly improved version of the Ping class from .NET Core.

Purpose

The standard .NET Ping class has a flaw. It only delivers a valid PingReply.RoundtripTime value for replies with status == IPStatus.Success. This is primarily a problem when using the Ping class to perform a traceroute, as most of the replies will have status IPStatus.TtlExpired. In this case, the Ping class has a perfectly valid round-trip-time already measured, but intentionally throws it out and constructs the PingReply with a RoundtripTime of 0.

Microsoft does not care to change this.

Many developers work around this issue by measuring the response time themselves using the Stopwatch class. Unfortunately, this delivers a significantly less-accurate measure of response time, as you are also measuring the time required for your Thread to resume after receiving the ping reply.

This project is a nearly-identical copy of the Ping class, and supporting classes, from .NET Core version 2.0.5. This version was chosen because it pre-dates several changes to the framework which made extracting the Ping class much more difficult.

These are the notable modifications:

1. Namespaces have been changed for reasons of compatibility. The improved Ping class is located in the SmartPing namespace.
2. All ping replies contain the RoundtripTime property as measured by the native Ping implementation, even if the reply status was not "Success".
3. It only works on Windows OS. While cross-platform implementations of Ping are available in .NET Core, they were removed from this project due to not understanding the build system that is required to handle them.

Usage

Download a release from the releases tab, or build SmartPing yourself. Include the appropriate DLL as a reference in your .NET project. Use classes in the SmartPing namespace instead of System.Net.NetworkInformation. Two DLLs are provided in releases.

• SmartPing.dll - Targets .NET Standard 2.0
• SmartPingF.dll - Targets .NET Framework 4.6.2