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Settings File as Dictionary with Serialization

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+1 A:

Try using protobuf-net. This would solve all three of your problems. I looked at it last week, and replaced my entire xml-based messaging infrastructure in just a couple of days. Marc Gravell is a frequent contributor on here, and he was very prompt and helpful in his replies to my queries.

Carlos 2010-05-23 13:36:05

How would I use this for settings? Can it serialize a dictionary?

AKRamkumar 2010-05-23 13:39:14

Yes, you can serialize a dictionary. In fact, I did this in my solution.For "Settings" I take it you mean that you want to store some values and restore them later, as in save/load?This would be easy. You'd take your object that you want to save, generate a serialized representation, and save that. Then deserialize it when you like.The only issue is that protobufs saves stuff in a very compact binary form, so you wont be able to visually recognize that the stuff is saved correctly. But it will still work.

Carlos 2010-05-23 13:50:14

Does it support Generics in that a dictionary<string,object> would still serialize? Since this is a wrapper around a dictionary, would protobuf-net serialize the dictionary instance inside the settings class?Basically I am implimenting a key-value system in the dictionary where both the key and the value need to be serialized.sorry if I am sounding a bit noobish, I am still learning programming.

AKRamkumar 2010-05-23 14:19:26

I think there's an issue around serializing object, because it doesn't quite know how to do it. That's where I had to make some small changes to my structure. Marc says V2, which is out sometime soon, will address this. BTW, there's a stackoverflow question about this somewhere, but I forget what it was. But the question specifically has an example where someone tries to serialize object, and Marc came up with a solution.

Carlos 2010-05-23 14:32:53

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Settings File as Dictionary with Serialization

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