Network Discovery

[praeclarum]

Currently the server binds to 127.0.0.1 and listens on a fixed port. The client connects to 127.0.0.1 with that port.

This works great for the iOS simulator, but pretty much nowhere else.

It would be nice if the clients and servers can discover each other. This would enable Visual Studio bridging scenarios and also running on Android devices. It would also enable previewing objects on multiple platforms simultaneously.

So, we need a network discoverability layer that works on many platforms. Any ideas?

[rdavisau]

I have basic service discovery implemented in a PCL-friendly library here. Given that project is 'alpha' and not getting a lot of love at the moment, I could factor out the service discovery code into a separate lib (as I have used it on a few projects now), or you could take some hints from the code. The core PCL sockets library that it is based on is stable. It was designed to be generic (too generic, probably - as you will see if you look at the code) - but the standard case is as succinct as in the readme. In summary, you define a shared 'request/reponse' protocol, which is a discovery port, an "object to send as a request", and a "response to send for a given request object (or nothing)"; then the library handles the rest:

There's a strongly-typed implementer of IServiceDefinition that lets you work with POCOs rather than bytes.