The Data Points column of John Papa in the August 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is now online and in this issue he demonstrates how binary encoding works, the effect it has on an application’s performance, and how it behaves by demonstrating it in action with Silverlight 3.
Silverlight applications often rely on Web services for their data. The performance of data retrieval and the ability to retrieve meaningful information about exceptions that may occur in Web services are two critical areas that have been improved in Silverlight 3.
Poor performance can be an application killer. Good strategies for retrieving data from a Web service can help, but sometimes it is necessary to retrieve an object graph that can be huge and take a long time to pass from a Web service to a client. Silverlight 3 offers a new feature that passes data from a Web service using binary encoding, and this can dramatically improve performance when passing large object graphs.