Converting an IP Address to Decimal

I am working through some interop code to manage a DHCP server from c#, which requires that I pass in IP addresses as their decimal value.

There are a number of ways to do this with loops and conversions and such but I wanted to write a way that actually uses some of the features of the .Net Framework.

This is a good example of using an anonymous delegate for iterating through a generic list (using the ForEach method) and building a hexadecimal string.  I use a simple formatting syntax to pad the lower-value bytes as required and then parse the entire string to get our decimal value.

private static string IpToDecimal(string ipAddress)
{
    // split up the IP into octets and prep our string builder
    List<string> octets = new List<string>(ipAddress.Split('.'));
    StringBuilder ipAsHex = new StringBuilder();

    // loop through the octets and build up a hexidecimal string
    octets.ForEach(delegate(string value)
    { ipAsHex.AppendFormat("{0:X2}", int.Parse(value)); });

    // convert the hex to decimal and return
    long decimalIP = long.Parse(ipAsHex.ToString(), NumberStyles.HexNumber);
    return decimalIP.ToString();
}