Creating Discoverable Network Resources (.NET)

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 开发者_高级运维IP for future communication.

Many Thanks, Ady

---

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.