Using protobuf-net with WCF and Silverlight

Question

We've tried all sorts of things but Protobuf seems to be the most lightweight and fastest. Now our problem is that we're using Silverlight as a client which does not make it easy to swap out the defaultserializers for WCF.

Is there any improvement in this area with protobuf-net?

Or are there any other suggestions in how we could speed up our webservice?

I like the WDSL which WCF generates on the client side so I'd like to stick with that. However manually doing requests is fine aswell, eventhough it would take a considerable amount of time to swap out our old service.

The "send a Stream or byte[]" is the only thing I can suggest, I'm afraid. — Marc Gravell
– Marc Gravell, Commented Jan 16, 2013 at 19:52

Grant H. · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-16 18:10:07Z

1

We basically ended up passing data as Byte[] arrays and manually handling the serialization/deserialization. There is a bit of additional work to do it this way, but in the end, it gave us better flexibility (especially with a few problem objects that Protobuf didn't really want to serialize).

answered Jan 16, 2013 at 18:10

Grant H.

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3 Comments

PeerToPeer Over a year ago

Which serialization does WCF use then? Did you change the binding to something else? At the moment we're using basicHttpBinding with the default XMLserializer.

Grant H. Over a year ago

We use a basicHttpBinding using binary serialization, and then just use a return type of byte[] for the service methods. That allows us to serialize the return objects before returning them, and deserialize them once they are on the client in byte array form. We use a shared library that contains the types you are working with so that both sides can serialize and deserialize as necessary.

PeerToPeer Over a year ago

Nice, we'll try that and see if it goes faster! Thanks for the explanation!

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