Protobuf-net Causing Certification Failure on Windows Phone Store

Question

I recently started using the protobuf-net library as a way to get around the lack of binary serialization in .Net Core on Windows Phone 8.1 for a port of an existing game.

So far protobuf-net has been working great for me. However when I came to submit the app it is failing the certification tests. The report lists various methods and classes belonging in the protobuf-net dll as being unsupported APIs.

An example from this report is:

This API is not supported for this application type - Api=System.Reflection.Emit.Label. Module=MSCORLIB, PUBLICKEYTOKEN=7CEC85D7BEA7798E. File=protobuf-net.dll. This API is not supported for this application type - Api=System.Reflection.Emit.DynamicMethod. Module=MSCORLIB, PUBLICKEYTOKEN=7CEC85D7BEA7798E. File=protobuf-net.dll. This API is not supported for this application type - Api=System.Reflection.Emit.ILGenerator. Module=MSCORLIB, PUBLICKEYTOKEN=7CEC85D7BEA7798E. File=protobuf-net.dll. This API is not supported for this application type - Api=System.Reflection.Emit.LocalBuilder. Module=MSCORLIB, PUBLICKEYTOKEN=7CEC85D7BEA7798E. File=protobuf-net.dll. This API is not supported for this application type - Api=System.Reflection.MemberTypes. Module=MSCORLIB, PUBLICKEYTOKEN=7CEC85D7BEA7798E. File=protobuf-net.dll.

There are many more but I have left them out for brevity. However as far as I can tell the MSDN documentation states that each of these APIs ARE supported on Windows Phone 8.1. Certainly in my own tests the library has been working correctly on device for some weeks when deploying from Visual Studio.

Is anyone aware of any steps that I could be missing here, some flag that needs setting in the package manifest or something like that? Or could I be using an incorrect version of protobuf-net (I built the dll from the WindowsPhone8.0 project)?

Thanks

Tom

Answer 1

As you're doing this as a Universal app, you're restricting yourself to the APIs that will also be available to desktop apps, and whilst part of the System.Reflection.Emit namespace is there, it does not include those classes that your error message refers.