Question

That is, I’d like my data to go one way – feed into a class, but then prevent it from saving out during a serialize operation. What’s the best way to go about that?

Answer 1

Ok, I tried the return null; suggestion, but it doesn’t work; it fails to deserialize. However, here’s a workaround:

public List<Program> Programs
{
    get
    {
        System.Diagnostics.StackTrace stackTrace = new System.Diagnostics.StackTrace(true);
        for (int i = 0; i < stackTrace.FrameCount; i++)
        {
            if ("XmlSerializationWriterApplication".Equals(stackTrace.GetFrame(i).GetMethod().ReflectedType.Name))
            {
                return null;
            }
        }
        return programs;
    }
    set { programs = value; }
}

While probably not very performant, this examines the StackTrace to see who called the get – and if it’s the Serializer/Writer, it returns nothing.