So, have you ever wondered how to get the information about the strength of your wireless signal using .Net?  It is actually pretty easy through .net. 

The .Net framework actually provides the ManagementObjectSearcher object which is part of the System.Management namespace.  This object is a query based object, meaning that if you want to get information out of this object you need to specify the given sql like statement before you can get at the information.  You can use this object to get information on disk drives, network adapters (wireless cards..), CPU usage and more.

Getting the information about the wireless strength is pretty straight forward and can be done in about 5 - 10 lines of code.

Here you go.

Main Method to get the data out of the managment object
public Int32 GetSignalStrengthAsInt() { Int32 returnStrength = 0; ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = null; try { // Query the management object with the valid scope and the correct query statment searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher( @"root\WMI", "select Ndis80211ReceivedSignalStrength from MSNdis_80211_ReceivedSignalStrength where active=true" ); // Call the get in order to populate the collection ManagementObjectCollection adapterObjects = searcher.Get(); // Loop though the management object and pull out the signal strength foreach ( ManagementObject mo in adapterObjects ) { returnStrength = ConvertToInt( mo[ "Ndis80211ReceivedSignalStrength" ].ToString() ); break; } } catch ( Exception e ) { // Not going to log this message, this is not that important. Plus if the box does not have a wireless // card we dont want to blow up } finally { if ( searcher != null ) { searcher.Dispose(); } } return returnStrength; }

Helper method to convert the value to a Int
private Int32 ConvertToInt( string input ) { int signal = Int32.Parse( input ); int maxSignal = -30; int disassociationSignal = -90; Int32 percentage = 100 - 80 * ( maxSignal - signal ) / ( maxSignal - disassociationSignal ); return percentage; }

Let me know if you know of any other/better ways to do this.