Make HttpWebRequest.GetResponse() return a value when the connection fails

Question

I'm developing a game on Unity that needs to reset the player lifes every 2 hours, and to avoid cheating I'm trying to use the Internet time. For that I made a simple method on C# to get the DateTime from microsoft.com. The issue is that sometimes the connection fails, and I want to return a bool when this happens, so I can get the System.DateTime.Now and check again for the Internet time as soon as the connection is available. I have tried some things but nothing worked. Here is the code I'm using:

public DateTime GetInternetTime()
{
    var myHttpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.microsoft.com");
    myHttpWebRequest.Timeout = 5000;
    myHttpWebRequest.ReadWriteTimeout = 5000;
    var response = myHttpWebRequest.GetResponse();

    if (response == null)
    {
        dateTime = DateTime.Now;
        connecionFailed = true;
    }
    string todaysDates = response.Headers["date"];
    dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(todaysDates, "ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss 'GMT'", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.DateTimeFormat, DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal);
    connecionFailed = false;
    return dateTime;
}

Please help! I'm really stuck on this!

Answer 1

GetResponse throws an exception when an error occurs. For example if host cannot be resolved. All you need is to catch it and do proper action after it.

In code below I handle WebException, but some other exceptions can occur during this method. So you can general Exception class instead.

public DateTime GetInternetTime()
{
    var myHttpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.microsoft.com");
    myHttpWebRequest.Timeout = 5000;
    myHttpWebRequest.ReadWriteTimeout = 5000;

    try
    {
        var response = myHttpWebRequest.GetResponse();
        string todaysDates = response.Headers["date"];
        dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(todaysDates, "ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss 'GMT'", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.DateTimeFormat, DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal);
        connectionFailed = false;
    } catch(WebException)
    {
        connectionFailed = true;
        dateTime = DateTime.Now;
    }

    return dateTime;
}