Question

Has anybody got this to actually work? Documentation is non existent on how to enable this feature and I get missing attribute exceptions despite having a 3.5 SP1 project.

Answer 1

I found that it doesn’t work with internal/private types, but making my type public it worked fine. This means no anonymous types either 🙁

Using reflector I found the method ClassDataContract.IsNonAttributedTypeValidForSerialization(Type) that seems to make the decision. It’s the last line that seems to be the killer, the type must be visible, so no internal/private types allowed 🙁

internal static bool IsNonAttributedTypeValidForSerialization(Type type) {     if (type.IsArray)     {          return false;     }     if (type.IsEnum)     {         return false;     }     if (type.IsGenericParameter)     {         return false;     }     if (Globals.TypeOfIXmlSerializable.IsAssignableFrom(type))     {         return false;     }     if (type.IsPointer)     {         return false;     }     if (type.IsDefined(Globals.TypeOfCollectionDataContractAttribute, false))     {         return false;     }     foreach (Type type2 in type.GetInterfaces())     {         if (CollectionDataContract.IsCollectionInterface(type2))         {             return false;         }     }     if (type.IsSerializable)     {         return false;     }     if (Globals.TypeOfISerializable.IsAssignableFrom(type))     {         return false;     }     if (type.IsDefined(Globals.TypeOfDataContractAttribute, false))     {         return false;     }     if (type == Globals.TypeOfExtensionDataObject)     {         return false;     }     if (type.IsValueType)     {         return type.IsVisible;     }     return (type.IsVisible && (type.GetConstructor(BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance, null, Globals.EmptyTypeArray, null) != null)); 

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