See Also: IPAddress Members

Thread Safety

All public static members of this type are safe for multithreaded operations. No instance members are guaranteed to be thread safe.

Remarks

An instance of the System.Net.IPAddress class contains the value of an address on an IP network. This address is stored internally as a long in network-byte-order.

Note: Different conventions are in use for ordering bytes within multi-byte data types. All IP address values must be sent over the network in network-byte-order. Network-byte-order puts the most significant byte first (also known as big-endian order). On the host, the ordering of bytes is platform-specific and this ordering is referred to as host-byte-order.

The IP address can be represented as four numbers in the range 0-255 separated by periods (for example, "192.168.1.2"), known as dotted-quad notation.

Note:

The address space is fragmented into different types determined by bits 31-28 as shown in the following table.

Bits 31-28	Address type	Address range
0xxx	class A	0.0.0.0-127.255.255.255
10xx	class B	128.0.0.0-191.255.255.255
110x	class C	192.0.0.0-223.255.255.255
1110	multicast	224.0.0.0-239.255.255.255
1111	reserved	240.0.0.0-255.255.255.255

Instances of the System.Net.IPAddress class are provided for common IP address values as shown in the following table.

Field	IP Address
Any	0.0.0.0
Broadcast	255.255.255.255
Loopback	127.0.0.1
None	255.255.255.255

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Requirements

Namespace: System.Net
Assembly: System (in System.dll)
Assembly Versions: 1.0.x.x, 1.0.5000.0, 2.0.0.0