WCF RIA over Net.TCP binding?

Question

I am trying to improve the performance of a Silverlight 4 WCF RIA application. As it's for intranet use only, I figured switching from the default binary HTTP binding to the Net.TCP binding might improve performance a bit.

However, I am having a hard time just getting a simple proof of concept application running. I have:

• switched the proof of conecpt app from Cassini to IIS (7)
• added the appropriate bindings and enabled protocols on IIS
• added a clientaccesspolicy.xml file to my IIS root

Now, when I create a context like so:

var context = new DomainService1(
new Uri(
    "net.tcp://localhost:4502/BusinessApplication/BusinessApplication2.Web/ClientBin/BusinessApplication2-Web-DomainService1.svc"));

... I get the following error:

The provided URI scheme 'net.tcp' is invalid; expected 'http'. Parameter name: via

Now I'm stumped. As far as I can tell, the problem is that the client being created by the auto-generated WCF RIA code needs to be told that it's to use a Net.TCP endpoint, but I'm unsure how to do that.

I've found plenty of blog posts explaining how to get WCF services going over Net.TCP, but I haven't found a single one talking about WCF RIA, and I can't find any offical documentation either. All of those explanations involve changes to the web.config file that seem unsuited to a WCF RIA app.

Could some one please either explain to me how to get this configured, or point me at some documentation?

Answer 1

WCF RIA Services depends on HttpContext which is not available with Net.TCP binding.

As for perf issues, could you elaborate a bit further? What is the bottleneck query/operation? What is the size of data (entity size x entity count)? What is the delta between your perf requirements and current perf?

Perhaps there are other ways that don't involve Net.TCP?

Thanks.

Dinesh

(WCF RIA Services Program Manager)