I realise that WCF and services in general are meant to be loosely coupled.

But I have a requirement that my client app can check whether an given WCF endpoint contains a service that matches its generated client code. In other words I need to check for a compatible service.

Obviously I could have a method that returns a manually maintained version number, but I would prefer not to have to write my own meta data system if WCF can do something out of the box.