Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

Data Contract Attributes

While using the Serializable attribute is workable, it is not ideal for service-oriented interaction between clients and services. Rather than denoting all members in a type as serializable and therefore part of the data schema for that type, it would be preferable to have an opt-in approach, where only members the contract developer wants to explicitly include in the data contract are included. The Serializable attribute forces the data type to be serializable in order to be used as a parameter in a contract operation, and it does not offer clean separation between the ability to use the type as a WCF operation parameter (the “serviceness” aspect of the type) and the ability to serialize it. The attribute offers no support for aliasing type names or members, or for mapping a new type to a predefined data contract. The attribute operates directly on member fields and completely bypasses any logical properties used to access those fields. It would be better to allow those properties to add their values when accessing the fields. Finally, there is no direct support for versioning, because the formatter supposedly captures all versioning information. Consequently, it is difficult to deal with versioning over time.

Yet again, the WCF solution is to come up with new service-oriented opt-in attributes. The first of these attributes is the DataContractAttribute, defined in the System.Runtime.Serialization namespace:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Enum | AttributeTargets.Struct| ...