Introduction
protocol buffers is the name of the binary serialization format used by Google for much of their data communications. It is designed to be:
- small in size - efficient data storage (far smaller than xml)
- cheap to process - both at the client and server
- platform independent - portable between different programming architectures
- extensible - to add new data to old messages
protobuf-net is a .NET implementation of this, allowing you to serialize your .NET objects efficiently and easily. It is compatible with most of the .NET family, including .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5, .NET CF 2.0/3.5, Mono 2.x, Silverlight 2, etc.
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/