title: A good broadcast mechanism for inhouse .net applications to announce their location and version?
body: <p>I would like to provide a large number of inhouse .net applications with a lightweight way to announce that they are being used.  My goal is to keep track of which users might benefit from support check-ins and/or reminders to upgrade.</p>
  
  <p>This is on an inhouse network.  There is definitely IP connectivity among all the machines, and probably UDP.  (But probably not multicast.)</p>
  
  <p>Writing to a known inhouse share or loading a known URL would be possibilities, but I would like to minimize the impact on the application itself as completely as possible, even at the expense of reliability.  So I would rather not risk a timeout (for example if I'm accessing some centralized resource and it has disappeared), and ideally I would rather not launch a worker thread either.</p>
  
  <p>It would also be nice to permit multiple listeners, which is another reason I am thinking about broadcasting rather than invoking a service.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some kind of fire-and-forget broadcast mechanism I could use safely and effectively for this?</p>