What are the deficiencies of the built-in BinaryFormatter based .Net serialization?

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If you mean BinaryFormatter:

  • being based on fields, is very version intolerant; change private implementation details and it breaks (even just changing it to an automatically implemented property)
  • isn’t cross-compatible with other platforms
  • isn’t very friendly towards new fields
  • is assembly specific (metadata is burnt in)
  • is MS/.NET specific (and possibly .NET version specific)
  • isn’t obfuscation-safe
  • isn’t especially fast, or small output
  • doesn’t work on light frameworks (CF?/Silverlight)
  • has a depressing habit of pulling in things you didn’t expect (usually via events)

I’ve spent lots of time in this area, including writing a (free) implementation of Google’s “protocol buffers” serialization API for .NET; protobuf-net

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