WCF Datacontract free serialization (3.5 SP1)

Question

Has anybody got this to actually work? Documentation is non existent on how to enable this feature and I get missing attribute exceptions despite having a 3.5 SP1 project.

Answer 1

I found that it doesn't work with internal/private types, but making my type public it worked fine. This means no anonymous types either :(

Using reflector I found the method ClassDataContract.IsNonAttributedTypeValidForSerialization(Type) that seems to make the decision. It's the last line that seems to be the killer, the type must be visible, so no internal/private types allowed :(

internal static bool IsNonAttributedTypeValidForSerialization(Type type)
{
    if (type.IsArray)
    {
         return false;
    }
    if (type.IsEnum)
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type.IsGenericParameter)
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (Globals.TypeOfIXmlSerializable.IsAssignableFrom(type))
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type.IsPointer)
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type.IsDefined(Globals.TypeOfCollectionDataContractAttribute, false))
    {
        return false;
    }
    foreach (Type type2 in type.GetInterfaces())
    {
        if (CollectionDataContract.IsCollectionInterface(type2))
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    if (type.IsSerializable)
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (Globals.TypeOfISerializable.IsAssignableFrom(type))
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type.IsDefined(Globals.TypeOfDataContractAttribute, false))
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type == Globals.TypeOfExtensionDataObject)
    {
        return false;
    }
    if (type.IsValueType)
    {
        return type.IsVisible;
    }
    return (type.IsVisible && (type.GetConstructor(BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance, null, Globals.EmptyTypeArray, null) != null));

}