Question

Using compression with WCF in IIS I can find documentation for, but its oriented towards using IIS features.

I can find people talking about how they’ve written their own compression handlers, but it all looks pretty custom.

Is there a best practice around compressing WCF? We’re using http bindings.

Edit: setting this as a wiki.

Answer 1

There’s nothing out of the box to help you with this.

You can indeed implement your own compression extensions for WCF – several folks have done it, and you should be able to find it using your favorite search engine.

But the best thing you could do for your bindings – as long as your clients all are under your control and you can easily configure them – would be to use binary message encoding vs. textual representations of messages.

You can easily combine binary message encoding with http transport – you need a custom binding, but that’s really not a big deal at all. Lots of folks have done that, too – so you can benefit from work that’s already been done:

• Binary Http Binding by Nicolas Allen (member of the WCF team at Microsoft)
• Silverlight 3 WCF Binary Message Encoding
• WCF Binary Bindings in Silverlight 3 by John Papa (Silverlight envangelist)
• WCF: Enable Binary Encoding Over Http