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.

Answer 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).