Question

For practical purposes, what SqlDataSourceEnumerator does is find all instances of SQL server running on the various PCs on a LAN.

Is there an equivalent for finding running instances of an arbitrary application?

Edit: OK, so this only works because these apps have a pre-defined method of cooperation. Is there a straightforward way of determining if a given file (the exe, say) exists on some machine on the LAN even if the app itself itself is not running at the time? Understood that permissions must be taken into account.

Answer 1

What SQL enumeration does it broadcasts an UDP packet (port 1434) on the entire lan segment (subnet mask). The SQL Browser Agent service running on various hosts listens for this packet and responds with the list of local instances. So for the enumeration to happens, a number of ducks are already aligned for you:

• there is a well know protocol for SQL isntance discovery, the UDP 1434 broadcast and response
• there is a service listening for this broadcast, installed by SQL Server setup
• there is a client library to implement the broadcast request formatting and response parsing which you leverage

For an arbitrary application to behave the same, the said application would have to implement these missing parts. Discovering arbitrary processes running on arbitrary hosts in a subnet segment is basically impossible for all practical means.