Among other enhancements in Visual Studio.NET 2005, we now have the System.IO.Compression namespace, which offers industry standard Deflate ("zip") and GZip compression codecs. Since I've been somewhat involved in this area, particularly with the binary serialization and compression of DataSets for remoting over the wire, I thought it would be worthwhile to compare the new SerializationFormat.Binary enumeration on the DataSet class, which now enables DataSets to describe themselves to the BinaryFormatter serialization infrastructure in such a manner as to be truly "binary" serializable, instead of injecting a big glop of textual XML to the Formatter's Serialize method, and to see how well the resultant byte array can be compressed using the new native Compression classes.
