Question

I am wondering if there are any performance overhead issues to consider when using WCF vs. Binary Serialization done manually. I am building an n-tier site and wish to implement asynchronous behavior across tiers. I plan on passing data in binary form to lessen bandwidth. WCF seems to be a good shortcut to building your own tools, but I am wondering if there are any points to be aware of when making the choice between use of the WCF vs. System.IO Namespace and building your own light weight library.

Answer 1

There is a binary formatter for WCF, though its not entirely binary; it produces SOAP messages whose content is formatted using the .NET Binary Format for XML, which is a highly compacted form of XML. (Examples of what this looks like are found on this samples page.)

Alternatively, you can implement your own custom message formatter, as long as the formatter was available on both client and server side, to format however you want. (I think you’ll still have some overhead from WCF but not much.)

My personal opinion, no amount of overhead savings you might get from defining a custom binary format, and writing all of the serialization/deserialization code to implement it manually, will ever compensate the time and effort you will spend trying to implement and debug such a mechanism.