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Catchy Title, eh? Dr. Dotnetsky told me to use it, and it's kind of
a funny success story (Frankly, I wish the guy would stop mumbling with
those Martini olives rolling around inside his mouth, it's hard enough
to understand what he says half the time anyway).
First to gain some insight into the process that this project has evolved
from, I strongly recommend that you read the original piece I did on
this back in January 2004, "True
Binary Serialization and Compression of DataSets". In it, I
name the various players (both programmatic and persona) and you will
be able to get a flavor for how this all came about.
This presentation is all about Binary Serialization and Remoting, why
they're good, and why they got left out out of the Compact Framework,
which is bad... It's also about how you can add Data Compression, and
put all three of these "back into" the Compact Framework, and
that's good! On top of that, every line of code is in the public domain
or under the very generous LGPL license, which means you are free to
put it into commercial software. Ain't technology grand?
Remoting Infrastructure
Remoting is one of the coolest features of the .NET Platform, and unfortunately
when the designers of the Compact Framework did their work, they had
to make the (most likely) painful decision to leave it out. Why? Space,
probably. Look at MarshalByRefObject and the System.Runtime.Remoting
classes and you'll see why. Not only that, but you need the BinaryFormatter
in
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary, which
comprises some 66 different classes and enumerations, takes up quite
a bit of additional space, and has so many dependencies on other BCL
classes that, well - it just wasn't about to be. So, you get a remarkably
complete implementation of ADO.NET in the Compact Framework, but no Remoting
and no Binary Serialization.
However you can still do "remoting" and you can even have
Binary Serialization in the Compact Framework! Binary Serialization can
be achieved through Angelo Scotto's marvelous creation, the "Compact
Formatter". My chief goal in working with Mr. Scotto to help
move his project forward was to get his class to be able to perform binary
serialization on DataSets, and he rose to the challenge with great success.
Now developers who've worked with Binary Serialization know that the
ADO.NET DataSet, engineering masterpiece that it is (and I say this seriously),
describes itself to the Serialization Framework only
in XML. DOH! You
run a DataSet through the BinaryFormatter and what you get is a very
large byte array filled with -- you guessed it -- a whole glop full of
textual XML!
Fortunately there are ways to make our friend the DataSet cooperate!
One of the most efficient ways is to use what is referred to as a Surrogate
class. The best example out there is Ravinder Vuppula's "DataSetSurrogate"
class, described in MS
KB 82970. It turns out that with only minor modification, any DataSe (except strongly-typed)
can be passed into this type of surrogate class and the whole class becomes
BinaryFormatter (and CompactFormatter) compatible. The reason for this
is because the surrogate class "unwraps" everything in the
DataSet into binary serializable types (mostly ArrayLists). There are
additional benefits to using a surrogate class - you can add your own
properties and methods to it (for an idea of what you could do, take
a look at my site partner and fellow MVP Robbe Morris's "Set
Class Properties from DataTable with Atttributes" article) and
of course, all your custom "stuff" now becomes remotable through the Binary
Channel. By the way, Mr. Vuppula of Microsoft informs me that "
We'll be doing true binary serialization of DataSet in the next version so that remoting of the DataSet will be performant right out of the box".
Lost in Space!
Now, I digress for just a moment to explain my catchy title "Lost in
Space Forever": During the testing of the DataSetSurrogate serialization
using the CompactFormatter class for the Compact Framework, I kept getting
"Platform not supported" and similar exceptions and the whole process
basically went off into LaLa Land (hence, "Lost in Space Forever"). Finally
after some serious headache-provoking debugging sessions, I realized
it was the Locale property of the DataSet that was causing
the CompactFormatter to choke. I'm still not exactly sure, but it seems
there are some minor inconsistencies between the regular ADO.NET DataSet
and the one in the Compact Framework. Not to be daunted, I remained true
to my credo of "Less is More", and simply commented out the little
boogers! The downside? Not much really, for those of us who speak English!
The result of all this work is that my final CompressDataSet class is
100% Compact Framework compatible, and adds in SharpZipLib Zip compression
to complete the picture.
So now, you really can have a kind of "quasi Remoting" in
the Compact Framework: You simply set up a WebService whose purpose it
is to receive byte arrays (not DataSets). Web Services are ideal for
working with hand held devices such as the PocketPC because the classes
to implement Web Service proxy classes through WSDL are present on the
Compact Framework, and they use the same standardized XML SOAP messages
as are used on the .NET Framework. The Web Service we use is hosted on
the ASP.NET runtime under IIS at the server, just like any other Web
Service. These compact byte arrays we send and receive are serialized
as Base64, which certainly adds a little baggage, but since you are passing
DataSets over the wire in a highly compressed format that can represent
as little as 2 percent of their original size, its a small price to pay.
Your WebService simply uses the CompressDataSet class to accept the byte
array, decompress/deserialize it using the CompressDataSet class, and
you can hook it up to a DataAdapter and do your updates the same way
that you would have, had a regular DataSet come over the wire! I'm still
seeing some issues with sending out a CompressedDataSet byte array in
response to an incoming SQL query, but if you send the original DataSet
out the
"old way", your CF application can perform the CompactFormatting
and compression locally, and save the resultant compressed DataSet to
its local file system, which is the major attraction of this whole exercise.
Local ADO.NET Data Storage with no licensing fees
This presents some interesting possibilities for local storage. While
SQL Server CE is available and does a lot, it also takes up space on
your device and requires a client license for each device. For simple
data storage, you can use my CompressDataSet which has many of the features
of a database "built in", and simply load it off the filesystem
into memory! You can of course also "Synchronize" with your
permanent database as described above through the WebService.-, by simply
calling GetChanges on your modified CF app DataSet,
and sending the compressed little new guy over the wire to your webservice
to handle the decompression and DataAdapter "Update". To complete the
picture, the webservice can send back the entire DataSet with all the
synchro and changes, to be recompressed and stored back on the Compact
PC's filesystem for local storage.
The Compact Framework Solution you can download at the link below has
a complete working copy of the CompressDataSet class, along with a webservice
"CFService". You'll need to ensure that the CFService subfolder
of the solution is set up as an IIS Virtual Directory and marked as an
IIS Application. The CompressDataSet project itself can be set up as
a "regular" .NET Framework project and will work in either environment
without changes. If you make any enhancements or changes to the classes,
please let us know so that we can pass them on!
Finally, when testing this, please do your testing in RELEASE (not debug)
mode and preferably on a real device (not the "Emulator") if
you want to be able to gauge how fast the process is. When run in debug
mode, there is a tremendous amount of extra baggage that really slows
everything down. The "Get Remote" option in the CF app gets
the DataSet from the remote webservice and saves the compressed dataset
locally as "ds.dat",
The "Get Local" option simply loads this "ds.dat",
decompresses and deserializes it, and populates your DataGrid with it
as a "Proof of Concept". This uses the Northwind "Customers"
table, but you can change the code to use whatever you want. One final
issue, if you haven't discovered it already: When setting a webreference
from a Compact Framework app, it may not know what "Localhost" is (or
the name of the PC) Use instead, the IP address of the machine when you
create (or modify the proxy class code in) your WebReference (e.g., "http://192.168.0.100/CFService/Service1.asmx?WSDL").
N.B. Reader Simon Hansman has discovered that there can be problems
when adding new columns or changing the Primary Key prior to passing
a DataSet in for compression or Decompression, and has posted
an elegant fix here. The CompressDataSet class I have presented here is already in use in at least one commercial application where bandwidth considerations are key, and they report getting average compression ratios of 92 percent.
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