WCF Binary Bindings in Silverlight 3

One of the most common comments I hear form people when they start digging into Silverlight 3 Beta (and Silverlight 2) is the lack of WCF binding options. Some changes have been made to include binary encoding in Silverlight 3, so now we have:

customBinding
- can do things like binary binding with WCF clients
- new to Silverlight 3 Beta
basicHttpBinding
- basic clear text binding
pollingDuplexHttpBinding
- exactly what it says … a pseudo duplex basic binding that uses polling

Custom binding with binary encoding is nice if you want to do binary encoding of the message. In fact, this is the default binding that is created when you use a Silverlight enabled WCF file template in Visual Studio 2008 to create a WCF service. Binary encoding often offers performance gains over text encoding. Here is a quick glimpse at the config setup for the binding

     <system.serviceModel>

    <behaviors>

        <serviceBehaviors>

            <behavior name="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1Behavior">

                <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />

                <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />

            </behavior>

        </serviceBehaviors>

    </behaviors>

    <bindings>

        <customBinding>

            <binding name="customBinding0">

                <binaryMessageEncoding />

                <httpTransport />

            </binding>

        </customBinding>

    </bindings>

    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />

    <services>

        <service behaviorConfiguration="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1Behavior"

            name="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1">

            <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="customBinding0"

                contract="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1" />

            <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />

        </service>

    </services>

</system.serviceModel>