How can I check for 3G, wifi, EDGE, Cellular Networks in Windows Phone 7?

Question

How can I check for 3G, wifi, EDGE, Cellular Networks in Windows Phone 7 using C#?

Answer 1

As of the Mango release (beta 2 and RC), this information is now available but it requires you to actually make a connection, presumably because it doesn't check until something needs it.

You can either perform a DNS resolution (see below) or use the GetCurrentNetworkInterface WebRequest extension method, which will throw an InvalidOperationException if the request hasn't connected yet.

There are also some events to follow in the Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation namespace, but I wouldn't be surprised if those events didn't fire until a connection was made.

Interestingly, it seems you can also prefer or require on a per-connection basis using the SetNetworkPreference and SetNetworkRequirement extension methods, though it doesn't go beyond wifi vs cellular.

DeviceNetworkInformation.ResolveHostNameAsync(
            new DnsEndPoint("microsoft.com", 80), 
            new NameResolutionCallback(nrr =>
                {
                    var info = nrr.NetworkInterface;

                    var type = info.InterfaceType;
                    var subType = info.InterfaceSubtype;
                }), null);

The enumeration values for NetworkInterfaceType (wifi/gsm) and NetworkInterfaceSubType (edge/3g) are available on MSDN.