ISerializable
As flexible as the preceding approaches are, they still constrain the
type implementer somewhat. Type implementers who need the serialized
format to use different names than the in-memory members, or who need
the mapping of members to serialized data to be something other than
1:1, or who would like to serialize as one type and deserialize as
another (proxy) type, may want to take control of their own
serialization via ISerializable and the other
interfaces and attributes that make up the serialization
architecture.
To indicate to the runtime that it wants to fully control
serialization and deserialization, a type implements the
ISerializable interface, which looks like this:
namespace System.Runtime.Serialization {
public interface ISerializable {
void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo si, StreamingContext sc);
}
}The SerializationInfo parameter is a reference to
a property bag[4] that you should store the type member
values in. Additionally, SerializationInfo also
contains properties that you can use to control the type and assembly
the instance should deserialize as. The
StreamingContext parameter is a structure that
contains, among other things, an enumeration value indicating where
the serialized instance is headed (to disk, into the remoting
plumbing, etc.).
In addition to implementing ISerializable, a type
that is controlling its own serialization needs to provide a
deserialization constructor that takes two parameters: a
SerializationInfo object reference and a ...