Get IP Address Using C# Code

Introduction

An IP address is an integral part of networking. This may be not as important from the C# point of view but we will start to explore the System.Net namespace from here.

In this, we just find the IP Address of the local device.

Background

In general, we can find our IP address by CMD command in other words ipconfig . And, if you execute this on your Administrator Command Prompt then you will get the basic Network details like Host Name, IP Address and Gateway.

 

So, to handle this thing we have a few classes in the System.Net namespace. In this article, we deal with a few.

Procedure

Step 1: Start a new Console project in your Visual Studio.
Step 2: Add a namespace in your project as in the following:

Using System.Net;

Step 3: Before fetching the IP Address we need to know whose IP Address we really want. It's quite understood that we want our own PC. But, that must be specified in my code because computers are dumb.

So, we can fetch the machine Name (or Host Name) by the GetHostName() Method. And this is inside the Dns class.

Step 4: We are now ready to get the IP address of the Host.

For this we need to use the GetHostByName() method followed by AddressList array (first Index).

And, in GetHostByName's argument we "host name".

Then, our code looks like:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net; //Include this namespace


namespace IpProto
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string hostName = Dns.GetHostName(); // Retrive the Name of HOST
            Console.WriteLine(hostName);
           // Get the IP
            string myIP = Dns.GetHostByName(hostName).AddressList[0].ToString();
            Console.WriteLine("My IP Address is :"+myIP);
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

The output will be:

And, this is my Local IP so don't be confused. You will have your own.

Conclusion

This was our first step in the System.Net namespace. In a future article we will deal with a more complex one. For this, I have enclosed my solution file with it.