Weird network devices

Question

I am using NetworkInformation namespace to list all the network devices.

NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces();

When I get the list, there are some weird unknown devices:

What are they? And should I, and if, then how, get rid of them? In theory it should show only Local Area Connection and Wireless Connection. Under Network Connections I can't find anything like that installed either.

Answer 1

Windows has network 'devices' that don't exist in terms of physical hardware - they're used for various things, such as VPN connections (like that tunneling pseudo interface) and the loopback adapter, which is what responds to 127.0.0.1

You can parse the non-physical addresses by using WMI to query the list of adapters instead,

using (ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(new SelectQuery("Win32_NetworkAdapter")))
{
    foreach (ManagementObject mo in searcher.Get())
    {
        if ((bool)mo["PhysicalAdapter"])
            Console.WriteLine(mo["Name"]);
    }
}

(taken from MSDN)

That'll only return physical devices, as you're casting the true/false value of the PhysicalAdapter property as bool.