Question

When an object is serialized (by remoting to be sent across the wire) does the instance method code get serialized? Or are just the class level instance fields serialized?

I am asking this as some of my objects have large method and want to know wheather I should be using DTO’s (data transfer objects) for sending data across the wire.

I guessing it’s just the data plus some type version data … am I right?

Thanks

Answer 1

Methods are never serialized.

Re “fields” – it all depends on the serializer; BinaryFormatter will do fields; you mention “remoting”, which suggests BinaryFormatter, but remoting is largely a hangover now – from MSDN (on remoting):

This topic is specific to a legacy
technology that is retained for
backward compatibility with existing
applications and is not recommended
for new development. Distributed
applications should now be developed
using the Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF).

If you use web-services or WCF: XmlSerializer does public fields+properties; DataContractSerializer will do marked fields, etc.

Regular classes are often reusable as DTOs, but if you need lots of control over the wire (or have versioning issues), a separate DTO can be helpful.

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(edit/additional) note also that there are other reasons not to like BinaryFormatter – it can be very brittle with versioning, and very painful to fix (although achievable). Other (more tolerant) serializers exist if this is likely to be an issue… if so, let me know and I’ll update.