CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wpfprotocol-buffersprotobuf-net
Mario Vernari
Mario Vernari

Reputation: 7294

WPF and protocol-buffers: do they fit together?

I am wondering what would be the best approach in a WPF (possibly MVVM) based application, where the data exchange with the remote devices is made through Protocol-buffers (if conveniently applies).

WPF is strongly based on observability, as well as the mutability of the underlying model/viewmodel, with DPs and INotify* interfaces. Is it fighting against the protocol-buffer approach of create/mutate POCO's?

The typical context is having a WPF client application, connected via TCP/IP to an embedded device running Linux. Basically, I'm evaluating pros/cons of several solutions in order to find out the best one.

Thank you in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 891

Answers (2)

Marc Gravell
Marc Gravell

Reputation: 1063338

Your key points seem to be about mutability and observability.

The google protobuf API is indeed largely immutable and won't love WPF very much; however, you also mention protobuf-net, which is not that pattern, and adopts instead standard .NET idioms.

A protobuf-net model can be any standard model you want. If you want it to have notification events... have notification events. It won't mind. I can't remember 100%, but if you are working from a .proto file, I believe there is a switch to have to codegen add notification events automatically, but .proto is entirely optional with protobuf-net.

The output from protobuf-net should be entirely interchangeable with any other implementation for your linux device. One option there would be Mono/protobuf-net, but you could use the "standard" implementations too.

Upvotes: 0

Kent Boogaart
Kent Boogaart

Reputation: 178770

WPF should have zero bearing on this because your data exchange should be separated into a separate, UI-agnostic layer. Your service layer can return non-GPB objects if necessary (or returns interfaces that your GPB objects implement via partial classes), and your view model layer provides yet another layer of insulation.

Upvotes: 3

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