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

The short answer is to support both Avahi and Bonjour. You'll need Bonjour support to run on OSX anyway, and if a Windows user has installed iTunes they'll already be running it.

As a fallback for Windows users not running iTunes, you can compile Avahi as a library for Windows (with a bit of effort) and bundle it. This is a non-trivial bit of packaging, but the alternative is requiring your Windows users to install iTunes in order to use your application.