Web service discovery in WCF : Ws-Discovery or UDDI?

Question

I know the distinction between UDDI and Ws-Discovery (well know location to search a service vs broadcast). But my question is : what is the simplest way to discover a webservic

Answer 1

.NET 4.0 will have WS-Discovery. See Messaging enhancements in .NET 4.0: (Discovery Part I) Using WS-Discovery in WCF 4.0. In the meantime, Claudio Masieri has provided an implementation. See WS-Discovery for WCF.

There's also a custom discovery implementation done in similar way as UDDI. See Windows Communication Service Discovery.

Imagine you have 200 clients using your funky Wcf service. They would all have in their conf file a section like this one:

Now, you decide to change the existing endpoint (server side) with a new one that uses SSL for security reason. How do you update your clients? You can quickly see that it can become tedious. So the idea I want to detail here is to implement a discovery service similar to what UDDI does and to use a metadata resolver to get the configuration out of the service in order to create dynamically a proxy allowing the client to discuss with the service.

This person has similar concern as you do, and seems to have a working solution.