[Mono-devel-list] Re: FW: Soap Serialization interop

[Robert Jordan]

Roei Erez wrote:

> I have an issue using mono soap serialization, and I want to know if it is a
> bug.
> The serialization and deserialization of the 'System.Collections' classes
> works ok with mono, but is not compatible
> with .NET, means that .NET uses other fields for serialization of these
> objects, and therefore can not deserialize objects
> that were serialized by mono.
> Is this a bug or there was no intention of making it compatible from the
> first place?

The SOAP serialization, like the binary serialization, reflects
on then private members of a class. Those members differ between Mono
and MSFT .NET because they are highly implementation specific (i.e.
they might just differ because the Mono team uses another algorithm
etc.). Only some basic types share the same member names, and, very
important: the same meaning.
These differences/incompatibilities even exist between MSFT's .NET
versions.

SOAP + binary serialization is only intended for short-living
objects, like in remoting contexts. Everything else (persisting
to disk/database etc.) should only be done with your own lovely
designed objects using custom serialization. Those objects
already interop between MSFT & Mono, so I don't think the Mono
team will ever start to fix this problem.

Rob