Formatters are used for encoding and decoding the messages before they are transported by the Channel in .Net Remoting Framework. The .Net Remoting Framework supports two types of Formatters : Binary Formatter - System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary and SOAP Formatter - System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap . The data in binary Formatter has smaller size when compared to SOAP Formatter. The SOAP Formatter is an XML based cross platform text format , so it can be human readable. The data in a SOAP Formatter larger size compared to Binary Formatter , so it can therefore reduce overall performance.