Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Applications

Building an ad-hoc auto-discoverable service

In some service hosting environments, the endpoint address of each hosted service is dynamic or frequently changing; or some services will constantly change their base address after every service or server restarts. In such cases, it is quite important to let the service client be able to dynamically discover the service location. Fortunately, WCF 4 provides a new feature called service discovery, which can properly address this issue. The discovery feature enables services to be discoverable at runtime in an interoperable way using the WS-Discovery protocol. WCF services can announce their availability to the network using a multicast message or to a discovery proxy server. Client applications can ...