Question

I have a WCF Windows service that provides data to 250+ PDAs via compressed datasets and was looking to redevelop both the service and the mobile application to use Entity Framework 4.x models.

In order to keep performance acceptable when sending/receiving data on the PDA I need to keep the data size as small as possible and was wondering if its possible to compress a IEnumerable from the WCF windows service?

From previous experience with the datasets I got a 80%+/- compression rate and even decompressing the data on the PDA achieved an overal 50% performance importment so retaining similar levels of performance is critical.

EDIT:
Could I use a binary serializer and then compress the stream? As shown here

Answer 1

If you can’t use the built in IIS GZip capabilities then you can always do it manually e.g.

public static byte[] Compress(this IEnumerable<T> list)
{
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        using (var zip = new GZipStream(stream, CompressionMode.Compress, true))
        {
            var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
            formatter.Serialize(zip, list);
        }
        return stream.ToArray();
    } 
}

Then just have your WCF method return a byte array which you can then decompress & deserialize on the client side.

The above code is an extension method so you can basically just call return myList.Compress().