NamedPipeClientStream Gotcha

I've been playing with the .Net 3.5 NamedPipeClientStream for NUnitGridRunner and had been testing my application at home on my portable, but when I moved to cafe I found that my application threw excetpions. The difference was that even though I wasd running both client and server on the one box, the bahaviour changes depending if I have a network.

As a result the code ended up like this:

public void Start()
{
   string hostName = Environment.MachineName.ToLower() == gridHostName.ToLower()
                         ? "."
                         : gridHostName;

   pipeClient = new NamedPipeClientStream(hostName, "NUnitGrid", PipeDirection.InOut,
                                          PipeOptions.Asynchronous);
}