Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010

7.5. WS-Discovery

WCF4 contains support for the WS-Discovery protocol, which allows the discovery of services on a network. WS-Discovery was originally developed as joint venture between BEA Systems, Canon, Intel, Microsoft, and WebMethods, and is famously used in Windows Vista to provide the "people near me" functionality. For more information on WS-Discovery, please refer to http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/10/discovery/ws-discovery.pdf.

WS-Discovery is a great way of easing deployment of your applications, and perhaps even making them more robust by discovering alternative endpoints to use in the event of failure.

WCF4 implements WS-Discovery via a new behavior called ServiceDiscoveryBehavior, which tells WCF to make a service discoverable. ...