[bob1029]

WCF is an unmitigated dumpster fire. We have actually written a non-WCF client that uses a raw HttpClient implementation with StringBuilder to compose SOAP envelopes around cached XMLSerializers in order to talk to other WCF services. First request delay went from 1-2 seconds down to a few milliseconds. Memory overhead is negligible now. Prior, you could watch task manager and immediately recognize when WCF is "warming up". Additionally, the XML serializer in .NET seems almost pathologically determined to ruin everything you seek to accomplish.

By comparison, JSON contracts are an absolute joy to work with. We still practice strong-typing on both sides of the wire (we control both ends), and have pretty much nothing to complain about. If you are concerned with space overhead w/ JSON, simply passing it through gzip can get you down to a very reasonable place for 99% of use cases. I understand that there are arguments to be made against JSON for extremely performance sensitive applications, but I would counter-argue that these are extremely rare in practice.

[heavenlyblue]

Isn’t the problem with WCF rather than XML?