Deep copy a dictionary (hashtable) in PowerShell

Question

Clone() only does a shallow copy and it seems there is no straightforward way to do this in C# without a bit of boilerplate code wrapping serialization (How do you do a deep copy of an object in .NET (C# specifically)?). Is there a simple way to do this in Powershell without referencing external libraries ?

Answer 1

All the libraries you need are there when you start the shell so it's just to implement the deep copy as per your link.

function Clone-Object {
    param($DeepCopyObject)
    $memStream = new-object IO.MemoryStream
    $formatter = new-object Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter
    $formatter.Serialize($memStream,$DeepCopyObject)
    $memStream.Position=0
    $formatter.Deserialize($memStream)
}