Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a serialization format developed by Google that is fast and easy to use. Frequently referred to as "Protobuf," the technology consists of a language- and platform-neutral, extensible, binary format for fast data exchange that relies on an interface description language, which is compiled to native code. In this section, we will explore Protobuf and how we can work with Protobuf and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented apps.
Protobuf-net is much faster than the other binary serializers available, and is much faster than BinaryFormatter when it comes to serialization, with a much reduced payload too.
To work with Protobuf, you need to have the following installed on your system:
Visual Studio 2013 or higher
Protocol Buffers for .NET (Protobuf-net)
You can freely download a copy of Protocol Buffers for .NET from https://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net...
