[Mono-list] serialization

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Unfortunately the serialize.cs tool derives the serialization schema by
> creating an object then serializing it. If someone can tell me how to
> reliably derive the schema via static Reflection (ie without the need to
> create an object), then I'll add the comparison to corcompare (and the
> class-status pages).

For objects with [Serializable], this should not be hard, as I am pretty
sure that this is done using the public field names (we just need to
write a test and find out if this hypothesis is correct).

But for objects that implement their own serialization mechanism, we
need to manually create an object.  Idea: using Reflection.Emit, we
create a small program for each object that we want to create, and we
call into our methods that dump the state ;-)

Not exactly trivial, but definitely a window of opportunity ;-)

Miguel.