What is the best way to check for Internet connectivity using .NET?

Question

public static bool CheckForInternetConnection(int timeoutMs = 10000, string url = null)
{
    try
    {
        url ??= CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture switch
        {
            { Name: var n } when n.StartsWith("fa") => // Iran
                "http://www.aparat.com",
            { Name: var n } when n.StartsWith("zh") => // China
                "http://www.baidu.com",
            _ =>
                "http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204",
        };

        var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
        request.KeepAlive = false;
        request.Timeout = timeoutMs;
        using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
            return true;
    }
    catch
    {
        return false;
    }
}

There is absolutely no way you can reliably check if there is an internet connection or not (I assume you mean access to the internet).

You can, however, request resources that are virtually never offline, like pinging google.com or something similar. I think this would be efficient.

try { 
    Ping myPing = new Ping();
    String host = "google.com";
    byte[] buffer = new byte[32];
    int timeout = 1000;
    PingOptions pingOptions = new PingOptions();
    PingReply reply = myPing.Send(host, timeout, buffer, pingOptions);
    return (reply.Status == IPStatus.Success);
}
catch (Exception) {
    return false;
}

Instead of checking, just perform the action (web request, mail, ftp, etc.) and be prepared for the request to fail, which you have to do anyway, even if your check was successful.

Consider the following:

1 - check, and it is OK
2 - start to perform action 
3 - network goes down
4 - action fails
5 - lot of good your check did

If the network is down your action will fail just as rapidly as a ping, etc.

1 - start to perform action
2 - if the net is down(or goes down) the action will fail

NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable is very unreliable. Just have some VMware or other LAN connection and it will return wrong result. Also about Dns.GetHostEntry method I were just concerned about whether test URL might be blocked in the environment where my application going to deploy.

So another way I found out is using InternetGetConnectedState method. My code is

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("wininet.dll")]
private extern static bool InternetGetConnectedState(out int Description, int ReservedValue);

public static bool CheckNet()
{
     int desc;
     return InternetGetConnectedState(out desc, 0);         
}