Silverlight out-of-browser apps: Network Awareness

There will be times when your Silverlight app is run but the end user does not have a network connection. A key attribute of making a functional offline Silverlight app is building in network awareness. In this post, we’ll look at how easy Silverlight 3 makes this for you.

The API

Silverlight provides current network status via the NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable() method. Apps can be notified of changes in network availability via the NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged event. The NetworkInterface and NetworkChange types are both declared in the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace.

Here’s sample usage of the network detection APIs:

...

    NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += 
                      new EventHandler (OnNetworkChange);

}

void OnNetworkChange (object sender, EventArgs e)

{

    if (NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable())

    {

        nwIndicatorEllipse.Fill =
                              new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Green);

        // and do something

    }

    else

    {

        nwIndicatorEllipse.Fill =
                              new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red);

        // and do something else

    }

}

What This Feature Is

The NetworkAddressChanged event – as the name suggests - advertises a change in IP address (availability). It is to be used in concert with the NetworkInformation.GetIsNetworkAvailable() to identify whether the recent change resulted in the system obtaining an IP address or losing one. The IP address is seen as a good primordial proxy for availability of network connection or lack thereof.

This feature is an answer to the question “Is this is a good time to make an outbound network request?”. Silverlight plays an enabling role in detecting offline status, telling you whether it’s worth your while to make an outbound call, or alternately to cache and persist data locally until network connectivity is regained.

What this Feature Isn’t

This feature is not an answer to the question “Is my site (or web service) up and running at this moment?”. The way I see it, Silverlight doesn’t play an enabling role in that situation – that is something your app can achieve with 10 lines of code. And such a service indicator is better off taking the actual URI and returning an actual response, rather than being a glorified HTTP HEAD wrapper.

Gotchas

Say you have 2 adapters – a wireless and wireline Ethernet – both of which are connected. If your wireless connection drops, the NetworkAddressChanged event is raised but in the handler when you query NetworkInformation.GetIsNetworkAvailable(), you still get true because your wireline Ethernet connection is still valid. When that goes down as well, the event is raised yet again and the NetworkInformation.GetIsNetworkAvailable() returns false. Always remember: from your NetworkAddressChanged handler, you must query GetIsNetworkAvailable to definitively find out the connectivity situation.

Other gotchas include the “illusion of connectivity”. This happens when you have some connectivity (say you’re on a WiFi network in an airport or a coffee shop) but not any Internet connectivity until you sign in or pay up. Your app may see GetIsNetworkAvailable return true, but should still try that actual outbound request to ascertain this.

In some cases virtual machines (e.g. Hyper-V running on your Windows Server or running Windows with Parallels on your Mac) may interfere with this feature and your app may see false positives.

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Previous posts in this series:

• Introducing Offline and Out of Browser support in Silverlight
• Silverlight out-of-browser support: What kind of apps can you build?
• Silverlight out-of-browser apps: The Install
• Silverlight out-of-browser apps: Launch

Related links:

• Peter Smith’s “Offline network detection in Silverlight” talk from Mix 09
• Code patterns for Online/Offline Network Detection

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