I have been trying to figure this one out, or at least figure out what google terms to use: basically, I have an object with a buffer that I currently serialize; but the buffer can get quite large, and there's no real reason to serialize it. But it needs to be reset to a new reference on serialization. Currently, if I deserialize my object, I get an exception later on, because bar[] has not been instantiated. I'm sure there must be a simple & elegant way to do this (rather than deserializing, and then looping through all deserialized objects with buffers and reseting them)

What you are after is custom deserialization logic in C#. That search will probably lead you to implement ISerializable.

Thank you!!

You didn't mention which serializer you are using, if it is the Soap- or BinaryFormatter and not the XmlSerializer, the easiest way would be to mark a method with the OnDeserializedAttribute and initialize your buffer there:

[OnDeserialized]internal void InitFields(StreamingContext context) {  bar = new byte[128];}

Quote:Original post by itachi
You didn't mention which serializer you are using, if it is the Soap- or BinaryFormatter and not the XmlSerializer, the easiest way would be to mark a method with the OnDeserializedAttribute and initialize your buffer there:

[OnDeserialized]internal void InitFields(StreamingContext context) {  bar = new byte[128];}

I am using the BinaryFormatter; and this is eventually how I ended up doing it. :)