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?
Yes, because of KISS.