Standard mDNS service on Windows

Question

Does Windows (some modern flavour) have an mDNS server installed and/or running by default? If so then how does one tell it, preferably dynamically, to start/stop advertising a

Answer 1

Have also successfully used C++/WinRT for dnssd discovery directly from C++ now. It appears from our perspective to be quicker and more reliable to query services and will let you easily install a watcher to get notifications when devices arrive etc. Of course, this is limited to versions of Windows 10 with support for C++/WinRT, which starts with 10.0.17134.0 (Windows 10, version 1803).

One caveat: We've noticed that it does not provide, nor recognise, a FQDN (trailing dot). So for a device that Bonjour OR Avahi would give an address of mydevice.local., Windows instead gives mydevice.local. Attempting to ping mydevice.local. under Windows 10 (1809) fails.