Question

I know that a private parameterless constructor works but what about an object with no parameterless constructors?

I would like to expose types from a third party library so I have no control over the type definitions.

If there is a way what is the easiest? E.g. I don’t what to have to create a sub type.

Edit:

What I’m looking for is something like the level of customization shown here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163902.aspx although I don’t want to have to resort to streams to serialize/deserialize.

Answer 1

You can’t really make arbitrary types serializable; in some cases (XmlSerializer, for example) the runtime exposes options to spoof the attributes. But DataContractSerializer doesn’t allow this. Feasible options:

• hide the classes behind your own types that are serializable (lots of work)
• provide binary formatter surrogates (yeuch)
• write your own serialization core (a lot of work to get right)

Essentially, if something isn’t designed for serialization, very little of the framework will let you serialize it.