How to Perform Multiple “Pings” in Parallel using C#

Question

I am trying to calculate the average round-trip time for a collection of servers. In order to speed things up, I would like to perform the pings in parallel. I have writte

Answer 1

The ping class has a method SendAsync. This follows the Event-based Asynchronous Programming (EAP) pattern. Check out this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee622454.aspx.

For a quick example here is a method I have that implements that article in a very basic fashion. You can basically call this as many times as you want and all the pings will be done asychronously.

    class Program
    {
    public static string[] addresses = {"microsoft.com", "yahoo.com", "google.com"};
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        List> pingTasks = new List>();
        foreach (var address in addresses)
        {
            pingTasks.Add(PingAsync(address));
        }

        //Wait for all the tasks to complete
        Task.WaitAll(pingTasks.ToArray());

        //Now you can iterate over your list of pingTasks
        foreach (var pingTask in pingTasks)
        {
            //pingTask.Result is whatever type T was declared in PingAsync
            Console.WriteLine(pingTask.Result.RoundtripTime);
        }
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    static Task PingAsync(string address)
    {
        var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource();
        Ping ping = new Ping();
        ping.PingCompleted += (obj, sender) =>
            {
                tcs.SetResult(sender.Reply);
            };
        ping.SendAsync(address, new object());
        return tcs.Task;
    }
}