Fastest way to serialize and deserialize a dictionary of values?

We have an internal storage format where entities of diffrent kind have their values in a dictionary, and the metadata for an entity defines what properties there exists values for.

An entity needs to be able to cross the wire and thus have all its properties serialized and on the other end deserialized.

We have a working solution for this, but since our object model is rather large the performance of the derialization needs to be as fast as possible, and the internal implementation of the values are not that important, other than that the storage has to be generic regarding how many and what types of values to store.

What are the most efficient, performance wise, way to deserialize the values, given that the internal storage type (Dictionary or Array or whatever) does not matter?

We are seeing about 2-3 million calls to our "SetValue" method during deserialization so a way to "initialize" all开发者_如何学C the entity values in one function call would be of most value to us.