Question

I need to persist an object that is not marked with the serializable attribute. The object is from a 3rd party library which I cannot change.

I need to store it in a persist place, like for example the file system, so the optimal solution would be to serialize the object to a file, but since it isn’t marked as serializable, that is not a straight forward solution.

It’s a pretty complex object, which also holds a collection of other objects.

Do you guys have any input on how to solve this? The code will never run in a production environment, so I’m ok with almost any solution and performance.

Answer 1

XmlSerializer may be a useful first thing to try, if the types are public etc

If that fails, v2 of protobuf-net (in progress, you’d need to build from source, but I can help) works with unattributed objects, so ideal for types outside your control – you just need to tell it what to include (via a DSL). The v2 code isn’t complete, but it covers most common scenarios, including collections etc (the incomplete work is mainly callbacks and enums).