Background
I have encountered a strange situation in my application that uses a 3rd party component. Quite a few classes in my application implements ISerializable interface to basically persist the object state back and forth. I face compatibility issues during the course of serialization when I serialize my app classes in one version and try to deserialize with a different version of 3rd party component.
Issue
The latest release of the 3rd party component saw some major shuffling w.r.t types and assemblies.
i.e. for ex :
Earlier a Type T1 found under the assembly A1. . Post new release, where the assembly A1 has now been split to two different assemblies like for ex: A11 and A12. And the type T1 is now housed in A12
The type T1 on deserialization, is trying to find assembly A1. But now since it has been moved to a different assembly like A12 it is throwing SerializationException stating it is not able to find the Assembly A1.
Things I tried:
1. SerializationBinder:
I used a SerializationBinder class which basically checked the incoming assemblyName and TypeName information and suitably routed to the correct assembly on deserialization.
2. AssemblyResolve event using ResolveEventHandler delegate
Basically i can extract the assembly file name from the assembly’s identity and I can re-route the updated path where my application can find the assembly file using call Assembly.LoadFrom to load the assembly and return the resulting Assembly reference back from the ResolveEventHandler method
Although both of the above approach works to a certain extent. It is quite a task to supply the routing information to the correct assembly for all the types that are marked as serializable in my application. Not to mention this has to be updated again for future releases.
So I'm here to ask for help/suggestions/alternatives
Has anyone here has experienced such a situation ? How were you able to tackle such an issue ? If you could be generous to shed some best practices and pitfalls to avoid when using Serialization with 3rd party components
Cheers and thanks in advance VATSAG
About BinaryFormatter: What are the deficiencies of the built-in BinaryFormatter based .Net serialization?