Reflection is a powerful tool when used correctly.  In this penultimate chapter of Fluent XML Serialization, I will show you how Fluently-XML uses configuration data built up from a domain-specific language to perform serialization at runtime.  Keep in mind that the code is still a work-in-progress, but it does indeed meet (most) of my original…

The design and implementation of Fluently-XML’s domain-specific language was covered in my last post.  The language builds up configuration information that must then be transformed into a form that’s useful for performing serialization and deserialization at runtime.  In this post, I’ll show you how that translation occurs. The Configuration Data As I illustrated in the…

Serializing objects to XML is easy in .NET thanks to the XmlSerializer class, but developers will quickly find that the built-in serializer is limited and not easy to extend.  A more flexible approach is needed to support complex serialization needs. Today I’ll show you Fluently-XML’s domain-specific language for configuring serialization behaviors, and I’ll dive (a…

The System.Xml.XmlSerializer class enables .NET applications to serialize/deserialize most types to and from XML using only a few lines of code.  This is a great capability and provides an easy API for simple persistence and interoperability scenarios.  As a developer, you have some degree of control over the XML that’s generated, but the process is…