.NET Alternatives to UDP Multicast

I am looking for an alternative to using UDP multicast on the .NET Framework and am looking for suggestions.

I need to se开发者_运维百科nd messages to several web servers running quite a few ASP.NET applications. These messages would be one-way only, coming from several different machines. UDP multicast would be perfect except that I can't use it due to it requiring administrative rights. See ASP.NET Multicast UdpClient problems for details as to why.

Is there something else that would work in a similar manner, allowing multiple applications to receive broadcast-type messages?

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Have you considered using MSMQ or a SQL database? Using a SQL 2008 database you can have the SQL server notify you of changes as well.

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A few possibilities come to mind:

1. Put your multicast UDP code into a Windows Service. By having only a single listener on the port, you wouldn't need elevated permissions. You could communicate with the service using shared memory or a number of other techniques.

2. Use async point-to-point raw TCP connections to a central message dispatch / relay node. Sending and receiving messages with async I/O would minimize wait time.

3. Use a persistent queuing mechanism such as Service Broker in SQL Server. It's still unicast, but you could have a single stored procedure that sent messages to all endpoints. Again, use async I/O to minimize wait times.

4. Use a commercial message passing bus that runs out of process -- something like Tibco Rendezvous.

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ØMQ has two CLR bindings that may be productive than rolling your own messaging layer. You can use PUB/SUB sockets to multicast messages over TCP or IP multicast as desired. Also as the library is external to ASP.net this should remove the restricted rights problem you are encountering.

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ActiveMQ is a free service like msmq. It can handle non-durable messages such as yours. The downside is that is that it requires a server because it's bascially as spoke and hub style approach where you have a central server. But it does work well in .NET and has great performance. I'm sending hundreds of messages across it per second and it keeps up just fine.

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Redis pubsub using the StackExchange.Redis API.

Simple, excellent performance, scalable and if you choose it you're bound to use it for other things like caching/session management/monitoring or any one of the other common uses of this swiss army knife toolkit.