Check Internet Connectivity

How to check is your PC/ Server is connected to the internet.... there are more than one ways to do that - using wininet.dll, calling for DNS resolution, pinging a internet server, calling a web page and checking for response status and as I wanted to be sure that client is able to reach my server so put them all together.

Multithreaded Singleton in C#

Many a times you run into scenario where only one instance of a class should be created in your application. If you need to know more about Singleton pattern, this article "Singleton pattern" provides good reading. There are quite a few ways to implement this (singleton) but after doing some search on the net found this one to be best for my case.

Get Unix Time/ POSIX Time in c#

Recently needed to convert the time into Unix format in C#. Since the Unix time format is basically a count of the seconds passed since 1/1/1970 (Unix epoch), this can be easily done using the DateTime object.

int unixTime = (int) (DateTime.UtcNow - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1)).TotalSeconds;

If you are trying to convert some other DateTime value to POSIX time, make sure that it is first converted to UTC.

Casting int or string to Enum

Quick note to myself :D

From a string:

MyEnum foo = (MyEnum) Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), yourString);

From an int:

MyEnum foo = (MyEnum) yourInt;