Are methods also serialized along with the data members in .NET?

Question

The title is obvious, I need to know if methods are serialized along with object instances in C#, I know that they don't in Java but I'm a little new to C#. If they don't, do I have to put the original class with the byte stream(serialized object) in one package when sending it to another PC? Can the original class be like a DLL file?

Answer 1

No. The type information is serialized, along with state. In order to deserialize the data, your program will need to have access to the assemblies containing the types (including methods).

Answer 2

It may be easier to understand if you've learned C. A class like

class C
{
    private int _m;
    private int _n;

    int Meth(int p)
    {
       return _m + _n + p;
    }
}

is essentially syntactic sugar for

typedef struct
{
   int _m;
   int _n;
   // NO function pointers necessary
} C;

void C_Meth(C* obj, int p)
{
   return obj->_m + obj->_n + p;
}

This is essentially how non-virtual methods are implemented in object-oriented languages. The important thing here is that methods are not part of the instance data.