NullifyNetwork

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I needed to send some data over another medium to WCF and wanted to retain my current objects and classes, but also to retain the serialisation format for ease of direct input at the other end of this communications 'tube'.  I was actually sending these messages over XMPP after encrypting them, which is what the next post will be about...  It's worth noting that serialization using WCF is marginally faster than the more capable XmlSerializer but at the same time this has its own quirks and tends to produce more verbose XML.

So here's methods to serialise and deserialise DataContract marked up objects to XML strings:-

        public static string ContractObjectToXml<T>(T obj)
        {
            DataContractSerializer dataContractSerializer = new DataContractSerializer(obj.GetType());

            String text;
            using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
            {
                dataContractSerializer.WriteObject(memoryStream, obj);
                text = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());
            }
            return text;
        }

        public static T XmlToContractObject<T>(string data)
        {
            DataContractSerializer dataContractSerializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));

            byte[] binary = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);
            using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(binary))
            {
                object o = dataContractSerializer.ReadObject(memoryStream);
                return (T)o;
            }
        }
 
(Google thinks I should spell Serialise incorrectly as Serialize so I'm very conflicted about which I should use in this article as anyone searching would probably look for the American spelling...!)
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