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Day 7 — .NET Performance Series
The Battle of C# Serializers: BinaryFormatter vs. MessagePack vs. Protobuf (with .NET 8 Benchmarks)
Why BinaryFormatter Is Dead, and How MessagePack and Protobuf Took Over Serialisation in Modern .NET Apps
4 min readApr 21, 2025
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In 2014, I wrote my first serialisation logic in C#. It was a simple data transfer scenario — one class, five properties, and a network pipe. Like many others, I picked BinaryFormatter because it just... worked. Until one day, it didn’t.
That day came in 2020 when Microsoft officially marked BinaryFormatter as obsolete. A flood of security concerns and performance bottlenecks finally caught up with the aging formatter. And so began my journey of discovering alternatives—MessagePack and Protobuf.
Let’s go deep, not just in comparison, but as a seasoned developer would: with benchmarks…
