Friday 30 April 2010

protobuf-net v2 on Phone 7

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I mentioned previously how protobuf-net “v2” works on iPhone; well, I guess we’re all still waiting to see how §3.3.1 plays out there…

So rather than mope, here it is working on Phone 7 Series emulator (¿simulator?), from the new CTP released today.

Importantly, Phone 7 lives somewhere between Silverlight and Compact Framework. It does not have any meta-programming support (no ILGenerator etc). So in “v1” (the currently downloadable dll) it had to fall back to reflection – slow, but it will get there.

In “v2”, we get the best of both worlds; on “full” .NET wecan use runtime meta-programming to generate fast IL on the fly, but if we know we are targeting a slim framework (or we just don’t want to use meta-programming at runtime) we can pre-generate a serialization dll.

I wish the screenshot was more exciting, but I’m a bit busy working through the last few “v1” compatibility checks. For obvious reasons I haven’t tried this on a physical device. When they’re ready, if Microsoft want to send me a unit for testing purposes, that would be fine… [holds breath].