Compressing a WCF Message

Every now and then there's a WCF message that passes the MaxReceivedMessageSize threshold. Here's a nice little helper class that will allow you to compress and decompress it, without depending on extra WCF configurations. For serialization it uses the XML-based DataContractSerializer, so you can deserialize the original types into other types and namespaces. For compression it uses a DeflateStream instead of a GZipStream for less overhead.

namespace DockOfTheBay

{

    using System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis;

    using System.IO;

    using System.IO.Compression;

    using System.Runtime.Serialization;

    public static class CompressedSerializer

    {

        [SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Design", "CA1004:GenericMethodsShouldProvideTypeParameter")]

        public static T Decompress<T>(byte[] compressedData)

        {

            using (MemoryStream memory = new MemoryStream(compressedData))

            {

                using (DeflateStream zip = new DeflateStream(memory, CompressionMode.Decompress, true))

                {

                    var formatter = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));

                    return (T)formatter.ReadObject(zip);

                }

            }

        }

        public static byte[] Compress<T>(T data)

        {

            using (MemoryStream memory = new MemoryStream())

            {

                using (DeflateStream zip = new DeflateStream(memory, CompressionMode.Compress, true))

                {

                    var formatter = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));

                    formatter.WriteObject(zip, data);

                }

                return memory.ToArray();

            }

        }

    }

}