Exit-games make a network library product called photon, and they have and actively develop a limited mmo demo. Rather than shooting off json or XML, etc. saying "MovePlayer" (with associated params), they nut that message down to a 2 digit int, via an enum - something like Operations.MovePlayer. There's no denying that a 2 digit int is smaller than a longer string, however I really hate the idea of statically burning each and every message into an enum.

Would there be an alternative way to have a MessageID property assign itself a unique 2 digit int based on a lookup table or something? Has anyone dealt with this kind of thing before?