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 new service?

If there is no standard then how does one deal with the problem of conflicts trying to run multiple mDNS servers in that environment?

Basically, I want to implement a service that will run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and which needs to advertise its zeroconf webserver location using mDNS. On Linux I just use avahi-publish (or install a config file). I'm guessing that the answer will be straightforward for OS X. I'm struggling to find information for Windows.

Answer 1

Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft made strides towards a native Windows implementation of mDNS and DNS-SD.

While earlier iterations have been limited to UWP apps, a general Win32 API has been exposed from at least SDK version 10.0.18362.0 (1903/19H1, May 2019).

Note: This implementation is currently confirmed working only for 64bit build targets, there is an open issue preventing compilation for 32bit targets.

Outdated note from a previous version of this answer:

Early iterations resulted in mDNS network flooding:

Windows 10, in its default configuration, will spam its local networks by responding to all mDNS requests with null response packets.

This issue was fixed in Windows 10 1511 (10586) and above