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SharpPcap's 10 year anniversary

I was updating the CodeProject SharpPcap tutorial and noticed that it's been 10 years since the project was originally started.

If you've ever been interested in trying out packet capture and network analysis, SharpPcap provides a pretty easy way to get started. The source download package comes with several examples that are easy to build under Visual Studio or MonoDevelop. Check out the CodeProject tutorial. If you have any questions you can post on the forums there or on the SourceForge project page.

Some work on network packet analysis got me looking for libraries that could help. I wanted to develop the analysis application in C#/.NET to reduce the overall development time vs. C/C++. Rather than reinventing the wheel it seemed useful to build on the SharpPcap library, created in 2004. The original author, Tamir Gal, passed the maintenance of the project over to me in 2008. Since then the codebase has been rewritten and cleaned up, unit tests added, and the packet parsing/generation code completely re-architected and split into a library separate from the capture code, into Packet.Net.

The project has seen a range of version control systems. The start of the project pre-dates my involvement but I migrated from cvs to svn in 2008 and then from svn to git around October 2009.

A wide array of packet formats can be parsed and generated by Packet.Net:


The CodeProject tutorial has been relatively well maintained and has over half a million views so far. The tutorial is actually in version control along with the rest of the code at Sourceforge. You can check out the git repository in your web browser.

The pace of development has slowed in the past few years, somewhat from my not using it. And I suspect also because it covers a large portion of packet formats, so it may be doing most of what people want it to do.

Project statistics

I thought it would be neat to look at the statistics on project downloads over the life of the project so far. Here are some project stats taken from the SourceForge project stats page. It has been so long I can't remember whether the project was migrated to SourceForge in 2007 or whether that might have been when SourceForge started gathering detailed statistics.

Over 100k downloads in the past 7 years

Even though SharpPcap and Packet.Net support Windows, Mac and Linux, some 94% of downloads come from Windows. This is likely due to .NET/C# being most popular on Windows.

Downloads by month

The future

PcapNg is the most frequently requested feature. PcapNg has several improvements over the original pcap file format, including things like nanosecond timestamps.

If you are looking for a network analysis tool to hack on, adding PcapNg support to SharpPcap would be a worthy project. We use git so feel free to fork from the SourceForge git repository onto GitHub and send me questions, pull requests, or patches.

I'm also available, on a contract basis, to implement improvements or changes to SharpPcap/Packet.Net for your specific application.
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