I have a class (call it Container) which is serialized and deserialized using the DataContractSerializer. The class contains a collection of other classes, all of which inherit the same base class (call it ContentsBase), but which have distinct derived classes. The application may be passed a serialized Container object which contains ContentsBase-derived objects whose implementation I do not know or have access to -- that is, the compiled code is not available locally. I need to deserialize this object by "ignoring" the types I don't know about (I don't need to round-trip them).
Is there any way I can do this, short of taking the serialized XML and writing some custom code to grovel through it and remove unknown elements before deserialization, or is that my only option?