Question

I have a dictionary like the follow:

public Dictionary<int, SpawnList> spawnEntities = new Dictionary<int, SpawnList>();

The class being used is as follow:

    public class SpawnList
    {
        public int NpcID { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public int Level { get; set; }
        public int TitleID { get; set; }
        public int StaticID { get; set; }

        public entityType Status { get; set; }

        public int TypeA { get; set; }
        public int TypeB { get; set; }
        public int TypeC { get; set; }

        public int ZoneID { get; set; }
        public int Heading { get; set; }
        public float PosX { get; set; }
        public float PosY { get; set; }
        public float PosZ { get; set; }
    }

/// <summary>Entity type enum.</summary>
public enum entityType
{
    Ally,
    Enemy,
    SummonPet,
    NPC,
    Object,
    Monster,
    Gatherable,
    Unknown
}

• How could I save this Dictionary to
  either a binary or encrypted format
  so I could later Load it again into
  my application ?

  My biggest problem here is not on how to save the file it self or encrypt it but mostly on how to do it when you have a class with it and how you go about deserializing it later.

My limitation is .Net 3.5 can’t use anything higher.

Answer 1

The easy way to get you started:

1. Make your class serializable by attaching the [Serializable] attribute.
2. Use CryptoStream and BinaryFormatter to serialize it into a file and encrypt the data.

The reference for CryptoStream provides a complete example for setting up encryption and doing the related file handling.