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I'm planning to develop an iPhone game. Is it possible to use .NET WCF as a backend? The server would be windows 2008 and MS-SQL database.

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I am not sure how mature the Apple SOAP development tools are so you might want to use the WCF REST stuff (WebHttpBinding). WCF is pretty slow so if you are thinking of making a realtime multiplayer game with it you won't have any success. – Jonathan Dickinson Apr 2 '12 at 8:17
Hi Jon, are WCF rest much faster? thank you for the comment. – Petrick Lim Apr 2 '12 at 13:20
@Jonathan: Could you please provide links supporting the claim that WCF is not good for realtime apps? As far as I know WCF + protobufs can give good performance. – Den Apr 2 '12 at 20:06
@Den erm, that's true - question is, do the iPhone tools support the 'proprietary' stuff that they did with that? – Jonathan Dickinson Apr 2 '12 at 21:47
OP: The WCF Rest stuff is marginally faster because it doesn't have all the SOAP overhead that Lurca described: but it's definitely not suited to realtime games. – Jonathan Dickinson Apr 2 '12 at 21:48

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SOAP has a lot of XML overhead! And parsing XML is always slow. Especially on mobile devices. Use REST and JSON. There even is something like JSON-RPC, just google for it.

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thank you for the info – Petrick Lim Apr 5 '12 at 15:30

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