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.