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I commonly have the need to discover which of my Windows Services are running on which servers in my domain. In the past I have solved this with a common pattern and protocol using UDP broadcast and it has worked rather well (in .NET 2.0 or 3.5). Now that I'm working with .NET 4 (which includes WCF 4 with its new Discovery feature) I'm wondering if switching would be more correct (and .NET friendly) for this purpose rather than rolling my own. My services generally don't host WCF services (if they did this would be a no brainer) so it almost seems like an abuse of the technology.

In short, is it generally acceptable to use the new WCF Discovery functionality when the application doesn't otherwise use WCF?

M.Babcock
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Yes, because of KISS.

lurkerbelow
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  • While I agree, I couldn't in good faith ever mark this as the answer. I'm looking for a technical or industry standards explanation. – M.Babcock Mar 01 '12 at 02:49
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    I'd say it is 'generally' acceptable because otherwise you have to use (commercial) monitoring tools. Those might be better than your solution, but at least you can modify your own solution to fit your (future) needs. So you gain a bit flexibility. You do not need maintenance contracts and also you do not have to wait for critical bug fixes, if so. You're on your own, which might be the better solution. Not generally spoken, but on this task it's from my point of view the most fitting solution. – lurkerbelow Mar 01 '12 at 11:17