Communicating over a network

[pigeonrandle]

Does anyone have anything to say about using xml to communicate
between client and server over a tcp network connection? If the data i
am sending is reasonably small, then i presume the added overhead of
processing the xml is negligible (in comparison to just reading
integers and strings, etc off the NetworkStream)?
Obviously in a production environment, i would be encrypting these
transmissions and so there would be other overheads involved, but as i
am not an expert, i do not know what they are!

Thanks for your comment,
James.

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

James,

Why aren't you going to use Windows Communications Foundation which will
do all of this for you? You are going to be reinventing the wheel if you
code all of this by hand.

WCF will use the WS-protocols, as well as binary encoding over a TCP
network connection for you between a client and server, as well as
encryption (and a good deal of other things as well if you need them).

The only reason I could advocate not using WCF would be because the
service has already been deployed and is in use. Even still, you might want
to consider creating new endpoints for the service which the new clients can
use.

Hope this helps.