Discovery in c#

Question

I've to implement some discovery for an internal solution.

We have two kind of software:

• Server: They manage a lot of hardware devices and can give access to some data (.Net remoting)
• Client: They can display data of one or several Server(graphs, stats, ...)

Currently we are setting the IP by hand on the client.

We would like to implement a discovery.

We have the following requirement:

• It has to be usable in c#
• When a server is up, it must be displayed as available very fastly
• Same when it shut down
• If the server doesn't stops in a clean way, we can have a way to detect it(no need to be very fast, can be done every 10-15min).
• It can give me some information(Server version, port to use, ...)
• We have client computer with multiple network cards, we must discover server on each cards

Do you have a protocol, a library, ... to advice?

We tried UPnP, but seems there is no good Server+client implementation in c# that meet our requirement

Answer 1

Use UDP broadcasts from the discovering app (client):

int broadcastPort = //something
byte[] msg = //something

//Cycle this for all IP adresses
IPAddress broadcastIp = //Broadcast address for this net
IPEndPoint destinationEndpoint = new IPEndPoint(broadcastIp, broadcastPort);
Socket sock = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Dgram, ProtocolType.Udp);
sock.SetSocketOption(SocketOptionLevel.Socket, SocketOptionName.Broadcast, 1);
sock.SendTo(msg, broadcastEndpoint);

And have the discovered app (Server) answer, to receive the answer use UdpClient.Receive(), which gives you the IP of the answering station.