Reuse classes and objects for both WCF and non-WCF

Question

I have several classes such as Order, Customer, etc. These classes serve for holding data and nothing more. I want to be able to reuse these classes in other projects in the future, but for some reason I don't quite understand, WCF forces me to decorate the data members with the [DataMember] attribute, forcing me to reference WCF plumbing that I will never use in other projects.

I would imagine that WCF lets you take any serializable class and use it as a content type. Am I understanding this correctly?

Answer 1

Yes, with .NET 3.5 SP1, the WCF DataContractSerializer will now serialize any POCO class just the same way as the XmlSerializer will - any public property will be serialized.

I don't know for sure whether that's a good thing - one of the pillars of WCF is being explicit, in order to clearly state your intent. I personally find it a good thing to mark your classes with [DataContract] and your fields and properties you want to have serialized explicitly with [DataMember] - it makes it clearer as to what's going on, and it doesn't hurt your POCO class at all.

And btw: you don't have to reference any "WCF plumbing" to do this - those attributes live in System.Runtime.Serialization - a very generic system assembly.....