Silverlight data access

Answer 1

It (based in part on the earlier question) sounds like bandwidth is the issue; I would give serious thought to trying protobuf-net; the "protocol buffers" format designed by Google is very efficient (much more so that the default DataContractSerializer), and it can be used very conveniently from .NET. Ideal for bandwidth-related scenarios. The only glitch is that currently the WCF hooks don't work with Silverlight (so you can't just add an attribute / config entry), but you can pass the data as a byte[] easily enough (just return byte[] from a method).

For example; if you have a record like:

[ProtoContract]
public class MyRecord {
    [ProtoMember(1)]
    public int Id {get;set;}

    [ProtoMember(2)]
    public string Description {get;set;}

    // etc
}

and a List<MyRecord>, then you should be able to use:

byte[] result;
using(MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) {
    Serializer.Serialize(ms, list); // or maybe (list, ms) ;-p
    result = ms.ToArray();
}

I've also seen somebody return a Stream on the operation-contract (rather than a byte[]) - which seemed to work better with MTOM (hint: you definitely want to enable MTOM if possible when passing raw binary).