Creating Discoverable Network Resources (.NET)

Question

Is it possible to create a discoverable network resource in .NET?

What I would like to acheive is a means of auto discovery for applications that run on a private network. The architecture will be similar to a client / server application, however the server could be any computer on the network. While the client would not be aware of the specific IP address that would be the server.

I assume I would need some form of multicast, however not having used multicasting before I don't even know where to start.

I guess when the client starts up it would broadcast an "is anyone there" message. Then each server could respond with details of their IP for future communication.

Many Thanks, Ady

Answer 1

For discover of things more generally than just WS-Discovery provides, look at using "Zeroconf" (Apple brands it as Bonjour), in particular mDNS combined with DNS Service Discovery. Mono.Zeroconf should work on MS .NET as well to privide a C# API for doing this.