How do you ping an IP address using VB.NET?

How do you ping an IP address using VB.NET without writing 200 lines of code?
While it's probably much better if you do write the ping code yourself so you can control exactly how you do the ping, there's nothing stopping you from spawning off the PING.EXE program that comes with Windows itself to do the work.

In a quick experiment on Windows XP, PING.EXE returns an error code of 1 if the host did not respond. If the host responded, PING.EXE returns 0. That's one quick and dirty way to do the work. Of course, if there's security issues or you are running as a Win32 Service, you may not be able to start programs from your application so you'll have to handle that situation yourself. As I said at first, I still think you'd be much better off doing the work to code up the ping operation yourself.

This was first published in January 2004

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