Question

I am developing a networked application that sends a lot of packets. Currently, my method of serialization is just a hack where it takes a list of objects and converts them into a string delimited by a pipe character ‘|’ and flushes it down the network stream (or just sends it out through UDP).

I am looking for a cleaner solution to this in C# while minimizing
packet size (so no huge XML serialization).

My experiences with BinaryFormatter is SLOW. I am also considering compressing my packets by encoding them into base64 strings and them decoding them on the client side. I would like some input on seeing how this will effect the performance of my application.

Also, another quick question:

My setup creates 2 sockets (one TCP and UDP) and the client connects individually to these two sockets. Data is flushed down either one based off of the need (TCP for important stuff, UDP for unimportant stuff). This is my first time using TCP/UDP simultaneously and was wondering

if there is a more unified method, although it does not seem so.

Thanks as always for the awesome support.

Answer 1

I would use a binary protocol similar to Google’s Protocol Buffers. Using John Skeet’s protobuf-csharp-port one can use the WriteDelimitedTo and MergeDelimitedFrom methods on IMessage and IBuilder respectively. These will prefix the message with the number of bytes so that they can consumed on the other end. Defining messages are really easy:

message MyMessage {
    required int32 number = 1;
}

Then you build the C# classes with ProtoGen.exe and just go to town. One of the big benefits to protobuffers (specifically protobuf-csharp-port) is that not every endpoint needs to be upgraded at the same time. New fields can be added and consumed by previous versions without error. This version independence can be very powerful, but can also bite you if you’re not planning for it 😉