Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Binary serialization of datasets

In version 1.1 of the .NET framework datasets can only serialize themselves as XML... even if you're using the BinaryFormatter. That can end up as a lot of extra crud on the wire. If you're sending datasets remotely to your clients you'll definately want to check this out. It's a surrogate class that gobbles up Datasets and converts all the dataset info into byte arrays and back again. As a test I had a dataset with 1000 records being sent across the internet and it took 12 seconds to load. Using the surrogate got me down to 3 seconds. Nice!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

(sorry- I didn't feel like creating a blogger account but it's julie... :-) )

just as an FYI - ADO.NET 2.0 will do binary serialization on datasets for remoting.

Beth Massi said...

Yea I know.. but I just thought people writing real production apps with datasets may want to know about this ;-) Some people aren't as beta cool as you :-P

Anonymous said...

ahh - don't get me wrong - it's *awesome* that you have something for it NOW. Why wait a whole year for the capability?!!