protobuf-net v2 and Monotouch : How does it mix?

Question

I have been trying to use protobuf-net with MonoTouch but I have no idea how, and despite having heard that it is possible, I haven\'t been able to find any tutorial or any exam

Answer 1

Just to bring this up to date there are a few issues with using WCF + Protobuf on MonoTouch. As you have observed the current releases of System.ServiceModel and protobuf light for ios don't include all the necessary bits.

However if you go and get the full System.ServiceModel from the Mono repository on GitHub and build it against the full Protobuf source then you can get it to work; I have done so.

You need to generate a serialisation assembly using the precompile tool then edit the ProtoOperationBehavior attribute to give it some way to reference your serialisation assembly. All the changes are too extensive to document here but it can be done and it is a lot faster than DatacontractSerializer which is pretty awful on iOS.

Answer 2

It is actually pretty much the same as described in this blog entry by Friction Point Studios. Since meta-programming on the device is not really an option, the trick is to pre-generate a serialization dll. This can be done by creating a small console exe (this is just a tool - it isn't designed to be pretty) that configures a RuntimeTypeModel (by adding the types you are interested in), and then call .Compile(...):

var model = TypeModel.Create();
model.Add(typeof (ProtoObject), true);
model.Compile("MySerializer", "MySerializer.dll");

This generates a serializer dll; simply reference this dll (along with the iOS version protobuf-net), and use the serializer type in the dll to interact with your model:

var ser = new MySerializer();
ser.Serialize(dest, obj); // etc