Question

I’ve got an object that is serialized from a particular legacy program, there’s little to no documentation on the type.

I’d like to extract the data into a readable structure into C#

I’ve tried:

• Opening the file in a hex editor and analysing the contents; they’re garbled and not very clear
• Without much description and presumably compressed

What I know:

• What the file represents
• I can load changes in (provided I don’t break any checksums or anything) into the legacy application
• It has been serialized by Ruby

Answer 1

You should not use C# to deserialize the file. You should unmarshal the data in a Ruby program. Your Ruby program can then emit it in a language neutral format (i.e. json, xml, etc.) that C# can easily read.