How to identify if the Network Interface is LAN or Wifi or External

Question

I want to differentiate between the Ethernets available on my system. Whether that\'s a LAN , Wifi or something created by VMWare. I am only intrested for LAN.

Answer 1

Look at using WMI to retrieve more detailed information about network adapters on the system. It'll tell you whether or not a given adapter is a wired network adapter or wireless, and if it is indeed a 'physical' network adapter.

http://geekswithblogs.net/PsychoCoder/archive/2008/01/25/using_wmi_in_csharp.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394216(v=vs.85).aspx

Answer 2

To find out if the adapter is a Wifi adapter you can use the MSNdis_PhysicalMediumType class in the root\WMI namespace.

Unfortunately the VMware adapters appear to Windows as if they are "real" physical adapters and have a MAC address and IP address etc so it's hard to differentiate those.

You'll notice in Windows if you run ncpa.cpl they all appear the same as physical adapters.