Question

I use C# .net 4.0 and don’t see any possible way to do it, but maybe you know? 🙂
I do my serialization in that way:

public static void SaveCollection<T>(string file_name, T list)
{
    BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    FileStream fs = null;

    try
    {
        fs = new FileStream(Application.StartupPath + "/" + file_name, FileMode.Create);
        bf.Serialize(fs, list);
        fs.Flush();
        fs.Close();
    }
    catch (Exception exc)
    {
        if (fs != null)
            fs.Close();

        string msg = "Unable to save collection {0}\nThe error is {1}";
        MessageBox.Show(Form1.ActiveForm, string.Format(msg, file_name, exc.Message));
    }
}

Answer 1

So, let’s say you use actually know in advance the size of your object graph, which itself may be difficult, but let’s just assume you do :). You could do this:

public class MyStream : MemoryStream {
    public long bytesWritten = 0;
    public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) {                
        base.Write(buffer, offset, count);
        bytesWritten += count;
    }

    public override void WriteByte(byte value) {
        bytesWritten += 1;
        base.WriteByte(value);
    }
}

Then you could use it like:

BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
var s = new MyStream();
bf.Serialize(s, new DateTime[200]);

This will give you the bytes as they are written, so you could calculate the time using that. Note: it’s possible you might need to override a few more methods of the stream class.