Question

Is there any way that I can consume WCF services that use binary serialization for their communication? What is the format of the serialization, can I somehow deserialize .NET serialized objects (with non .NET)?

Answer 1

If by “binary serialization” you mean endpoints with the binary encoding, then yes, you can somehow deserialize the .NET objects on non-.NET clients – the format is publicly documented (see below). However, AFAIK there are no libraries for non-.NET clients which can deserialize objects in that format, so you’re on your own. If you can, you really should consider adding another endpoint that exposes the data in “normal” XML.

The binary format (again, if that’s what you’re using – the binary encoder) is actually just a format for XML. So instead of having the data serialized in a format such as

<Person xmlns="http://my.namespace.com">
    <Name>John Doe</Name>
    <Age>29</Age>
</Person>

It would be serialized in a binary version of it, but it would represent the same data (XML Infoset).

The specification for the binary XML format can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219210(v=prot.10).aspx. The binary format also defines a dictionary concept (for eliminating from the stream repeated or commonly used strings), and you’ll likely need to look at the “SOAP Data Structure” protocol at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219175(v=prot.10).aspx as well.