protobuf-net and wcf web apis

Question

I haven't used wcf web api yet. Glenn Block's demo at MIX11 looked real nice so I will certainly dig into that.

In the meantime, I'm wondering how it could be used together with protocol buffers (mainly for performance reasons). The idea would be to put in place an application/x-protobuf MIME type (or equivalent).

I guess we could :

• get rid of soap based attributes
• define a custom media type processor that serializes / deserializes messages with protobuf-net

Do you think that would work ?

Answer 1

Speaking as someone who is rather familiar with protobuf-net, I honestly haven't tried that approach, but glancing at that blog entry it looks encouraging. If it works, I'd be happy to add support to the core library (at least, the 3.0 version).

I realise this isn't really an answer, but I can't see a reason why it shouldn't, given thaw it works for BSON.