Question

I’m working on a project that involves some home-made (de-)serialization code, and I have run into some issues with the deserializing of a List. The following code is throwing a NullReferenceException on the second line, even though the var list is not null, and happily reports Count = 0 when hovering my mouse over it.

System.Collections.IList list = ((System.Collections.IList)obj); list.Add(val); 

My variables are being instantiated a bit weird, so maybe that has got something to do with it? This is the code involved.

System.Runtime.Serialization.FormatterServices.GetUninitializedObject(type); 

Where type is

System.Type.GetType('System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[Networking.Client, Networking, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]], mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'); 

Any help would be much appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

Bah, I hate finding an answer just after I asked a question about it. As it turns out List<T> does not like to be instantiated using GetUninitializedObject, so I had to add a special case for Lists to use Activator.CreateInstance (which is not an option for most classes).