Folks, I have to send several thousand database entities of different types to both a Silverlight 5 and WPF app for display in a grid. I can't "page" the data because it's all got to be loaded to allow a snappy response to filtering it. I'm fishing for ways of getting the data across with the least suffering and complexity ... don't forget that Silverlight is involved.
Does a WCF service with http binding allow streaming? That would be the ideal technique if it comes out of the box and isn't too complex. I ran an experiment to convert ~6000 entities into XML and the size is a hefty 6MB (no surprise!), however Ionic.Zlib deflates it down to a 500KB buffer which transmits acceptably fast. I'm unhappy with my code to round trip the entities-to-XML as it's a bit messy and has special case logic to skip association properties. Then I thought of Json, which I haven't need to use before. Would the Jason libraries make round-tripping easier? Are the built-in Framework classes good enough, or would I need to use something like NewtonSoft? Can I control which properties are processed? Any general ideas would be welcome. Greg K