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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T04:27:41+00:00

I have several classes such as Order, Customer, etc. These classes serve for holding

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I have several classes such as Order, Customer, etc. These classes serve for holding data and nothing more. I want to be able to reuse these classes in other projects in the future, but for some reason I don’t quite understand, WCF forces me to decorate the data members with the [DataMember] attribute, forcing me to reference WCF plumbing that I will never use in other projects.

I would imagine that WCF lets you take any serializable class and use it as a content type. Am I understanding this correctly?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, with .NET 3.5 SP1, the WCF DataContractSerializer will now serialize any POCO class just the same way as the XmlSerializer will – any public property will be serialized.

    I don’t know for sure whether that’s a good thing – one of the pillars of WCF is being explicit, in order to clearly state your intent. I personally find it a good thing to mark your classes with [DataContract] and your fields and properties you want to have serialized explicitly with [DataMember] – it makes it clearer as to what’s going on, and it doesn’t hurt your POCO class at all.

    And btw: you don’t have to reference any “WCF plumbing” to do this – those attributes live in System.Runtime.Serialization – a very generic system assembly…..

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