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Asked: 2026-05-11T17:02:54+00:00

What are the deficiencies of the built-in BinaryFormatter based .Net serialization? (Performance, flexibility, restrictions)

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What are the deficiencies of the built-in BinaryFormatter based .Net serialization? (Performance, flexibility, restrictions)

Please accompany your answer with some code if possible.

Example:

Custom objects being serialized must be decorated with the [Serializable] attribute or implement the ISerializable interface.

Less obvious example:

Anonymous types can not be serialized.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you mean BinaryFormatter:

    • being based on fields, is very version intolerant; change private implementation details and it breaks (even just changing it to an automatically implemented property)
    • isn’t cross-compatible with other platforms
    • isn’t very friendly towards new fields
    • is assembly specific (metadata is burnt in)
    • is MS/.NET specific (and possibly .NET version specific)
    • isn’t obfuscation-safe
    • isn’t especially fast, or small output
    • doesn’t work on light frameworks (CF?/Silverlight)
    • has a depressing habit of pulling in things you didn’t expect (usually via events)

    I’ve spent lots of time in this area, including writing a (free) implementation of Google’s “protocol buffers” serialization API for .NET; protobuf-net

    This is:

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