Question

How to serialize a rather complex structure into a byte[] array, using BinaryWriter?

Update:

• For this to work, every structure (and sub-structure?) must be decorated with the [Serializable] attribute.

• I do not need to implement the ISerializable interface, as this is designed to give an object control over its own serialization.

Answer 1

From comments, the OP’s scenario requires strong compatibility with future versions of the application / .NET, in which case I always advise againt BinaryFormatter – it has many “features” that simply don’t work well between versions (and certainly not between platforms).

I recommend looking at contract-based serializers; I’m biased, but I lean towards protobuf-net (which maps to Google’s protobuf specification). The easiest way to do this is to attribute the types in such a way that the library can make light work of them (although it can also be done without attributes), for example:

 [ProtoContract]
 public class Customer {
     [ProtoMember(1)]
     public List<Order> Orders {get {....}}

     [ProtoMember(2)]
     public string Name {get;set;}

     ... etc
 }

(the attribute appoach is very familiar if you’ve done any XmlSerializer or DataContractSerializer work – and indeed protobuf-net can consume the attributes from those if you don’t want to add protobuf-net specific attributes)

then something like:

Customer cust = ...
byte[] data;
using(var ms = new MemoryStream()) {
    Serializer.Serialize(ms, cust);
    data = ms.ToArray();
}

The data produced this way is platform independent, and could be loaded on any matching contract (it doesn’t even need to be Customer – it could any type with matching layout via the attributes). Indeed, in most cases it’ll load easily into any other protobuf implementation – Java, C++, etc.