Question

I wonder if anyone can recommend an alternative to Automapper that will work in .NET2.0.

I have a dll which describes a reasonably complex structure. The dll sits at both ends of webservice however when the data is retrieved through the webservice, the namespaces prevent direct mapping of the object so I am having to resort to coding a mapping class.

I incorporated Automapper and it does exactly as I want but it won’t work with .NET2.0. I need to use .NET2.0 as there are several hundred remote machines which will run the client software and they are limited to .NET2.0.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Since this is 2.0, I’m guessing this is a regular wsdl-based web-service, working via XmlSerializer (unlike WCF which uses DataContractSerializer by default). If this is the case, you should be able to use XmlSerializer twice:

FromType fromObj = ...;
ToType toObj;
using(var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    new XmlSerializer(typeof(FromType)).Serialize(ms, fromObj);
    ms.Position = 0;
    toObj = (ToType) new XmlSerializer(typeof(ToType)).Deserialize(ms);
}

Perhaps not ideal, but it should work as long as the types are compatible.

Frustratingly, the WCF tooling has inbuilt support for re-using existing type definitions, to avoid duplication like this. But that is 3.0, obviously.