Question

I need to read objects binary data (including private fields) to process and serialize them in a specific way.

How can I do this in C#, do I need MSIL coding?

Answer 1

You can do it using reflection and (optionally) dynamic IL generation.

For example, once you know the type (i.e. have a System.Type instance), you can enumerate all fields (type.GetFields() returns a list of FieldInfo objects), and then use GetValue method to get field value. This works with private fields, as long as the security trust level checks are passed.

This is not very fast, so you may want to precompile the field access code (only do that after the profiler tells you!). In this case, you can use System.Reflection.Emit and DynamicMethod facilities. (you can find the tutorials on Google and on MSDN; I found it helpful to compile some functions that do what I have to do with C#/F# and then inspect the MSIL output in Reflector/ildasm).