Timeout Errors

[Charles A. Lackman]

Hello,

I have a desktop app that retrieves data from a web service, It has worked
really good for over a year, but there is an ongoing problem that I have not
been able to fix.

When the client is not online, it take over 90 seconds for the application
to through a exception that the underline connection is closed.

This there a way to speed this up. Instead of it taking 90 seconds,
something like 15 seconds?

I am testing the connection to the web service by called a function called
ISOnline.
All it does is return a True

If true is not returned then I do something else, but I still get a timeout
exception...
Any Assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Chuck

[Peter Kelcey]

Chuck,

The client-side timeout is specified by the Timeout property of the
proxy class.
I.e.

Service1 ws = new Service1();
ws.Timeout = 90000; // 90 seconds
ws.DoMethod();

I would also suggest that instead of just waiting for connection
timeout, you may want to pro-actively determine if the machine is
connected or not, before you even make the webservice call. This would
let your application begin to act more like a smart client, that is
able to determine it's own status and take the approriate actions based
on that status.

There are a couple of methods you can use for to determine if you are
online or not. The first one is pretty simple to use and determines if
the machine has a valid internet connection. This is the same method
used by IE to determine if the user if online or offline.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

[DllImport("wininet.dll")]
private extern static bool InternetGetConnectedState( out int
connectionDescription, int reservedValue ) ;

public bool IsConnected()
{
int connectionDescription = 0;
return InternetGetConnectedState(out connectionDescription, 0);
}
This second method will tell you if you are connected to a network and
identifies the type, i.e. LAN or WAN.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

[DllImport("sensapi.dll" ) ]
public static extern bool IsNetworkAlive( out int flags );

if( IsNetworkAlive( out flags ) )
MessageBox.Show( "Network connected, flags:" + flags.ToString() );
else
MessageBox.Show( "Network NOT connected!" );

Your third option, scans your network devices and tells you if any of
them are connected. This is the only one that will detect an unplugged
cable scenario. I.e. You were connected, but the cable was unplugged
since then. The previous two methods would still return a incorrect
"true" value under that condition.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Management;

static bool IsActiveConnection()
{
ManagementClass managementClass = new ManagementClass( @"root\WMI",
@"MSNdis_MediaConnectStatus", null );
ManagementObjectCollection DeviceCollection =
managementClass.GetInstances();

foreach( ManagementObject device in DeviceCollection )
{
string name = (string) device["InstanceName"];
bool active = (bool) device["Active"];
uint status = (uint) device["NdisMediaConnectStatus"];
if (status == 0)
{
//We've found at least one live connection
return(true);
}
}
//No live connections were found
return(false);
}

Hope that helps

Peter Kelcey