I'm currently working on a cross-platform application (Win/OSX/iOS) which has a C++ (with Boost) back end. On iOS and OSX I'm using the Cocoa Net Service Browser Delegate functions to discover an embedded device via mDNS, then pass the information to the back end to create the objects it needs to communicate with it.
I wanted to take a similar approach with my Windows MFC front end and I found this article which seemed to do exactly what I want. However, it seems that using the Bonjour SDK has some really nasty side effects - forcing you to static link to MFC and in my case the only way I can get it to link properly is to not use debug DLLs at all, which is not ideal.
So, the Bonjour SDK isn't really any good for me because it imposes too many restrictions on my project. With Cocoa I'm actually using very little of the functionality - just didFindService and netServiceDidResolveAddress really. All I want to do is find the devices of a given type and get their IP addresses.
Can anyone suggest another way around this that will work with an MFC front end on Windows?
Bonjour is a networking technology that allows devices to automatically discover each other without any configuration. In the first release, Bonjour operated on the local network to provide ad-hoc discovery for applications and devices. Starting in Mac OS X v10.
In fact, it is so easy to implement that any given operating system, Windows included, could have multiple mDNS resolvers running at the same time. Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, etc.) have an mDNS resolver. Microsoft Teams has been known to use mDNS.
In other words, Bonjour is a software component that is used for other devices discovery (PC, Mac, smartphones, printers, etc) in a network via all available interfaces. A Bonjour term for a device on a network is “service”.
Multicast DNS (mDNS) provides a naming service system that is easy to set up and maintain, for computers on a local link. All participating network devices on the same local link perform standard DNS functions, using multicast DNS rather than unicast, and do not need a unicast DNS server.
From what I have been able to gather from researching this topic just goto http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/mDNSResponder/mDNSResponder-333.10/ and grab the source. There is a VC project file which will let you build the dll how you want.
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