I would like to provide a large number of inhouse .net applications with a lightweight way to announce that they are being used. My goal is to keep track of which users might benefit from support check-ins and/or reminders to upgrade.
This is on an inhouse network. There is definitely IP connectivity among all the machines, and probably UDP. (But probably not multicast.)
Writing to a known inhouse share or loading a known URL would be possibilities, but I would like to minimize the impact on the application itself as completely as possible, even at the expense of reliability. So I would rather not risk a timeout (for example if I'm accessing some centralized resource and it has disappeared), and ideally I would rather not launch a worker thread either.
It would also be nice to permit multiple listeners, which is another reason I am thinking about broadcasting rather than invoking a service.
Is there some kind of fire-and-forget broadcast mechanism I could use safely and effectively for this?