What is the best way to clone a business object in Silverlight?

Question

What is the best way to create a clone of a DTO? There is not an ICloneable interface or a BinaryFormatter class in Silverlight. Is reflection the only way?

Answer 1

I believe the standard cloning functionality was left out to keep it simple and lightweight. I believe you could use either JSON or XML serialization to achieve the same thing though. Not sure about the performance costs though.

Answer 2

Here is the code we came up with for cloning. This works in Silverlight 2 & 3.

Public Shared Function Clone(Of T)(ByVal source As T) As T
    Dim serializer As New DataContractSerializer(GetType(T))
    Using ms As New MemoryStream
        serializer.WriteObject(ms, source)
        ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
        Return DirectCast(serializer.ReadObject(ms), T)
    End Using
End Function