Mattias: Well "Field" it actually is. Compiles and all that too. Funnily enough, Resharper flags it as bad code... but it still compiles
Roy,
Curiously enough, this seems to work in .NET 2.0 even without the NonSerialized attribute being placed on delegates. What's even curious-er, the subscriptions to the delegates even are deserialized properly. Are you saying we should stay away from that *feature* ?
- Sahil
Sahil: yeah - you should stay away from serializing and deserializing your delegates, because the way serializtion works, it will take the object and all the fields it has and serialize them. It will *recursively* go throuh each object's fields and serialize thos as well. For evenets and delegates, this means that it will go through all the current subscribers of the event and serialize them as well. It *might* work, but what happens when you have a class that cannot be serialized that subscribes to your event? Your serialization will fail. Since you can't *force* your subscribers to be serializable (that's the whole idea with the publish subscribe model - you never know who listens to your events) you should always assume that they are not playing nice, thus - you should avoid from serializing them using the [nonserialized] attribute.
Roy make sense, but I've been trying hard to make Serialization using the BinaryFormatter fail using the [Serializable] attribute, but it always seems to work LOL. I understand the infinitely recursive pattern, though there is the situation where you serialize something on one machine, transport it to another, and deserialize where the subscribers aren't there .. then what happens !! It still didn't fail LOL.
Anyway, I understand the argument, though in practice I've been myself arguing with it in my head. Could it be said that "Because it's so automatic, be scared of anything that is so automatic since you don't really know what it'll do cuz it has a mind of it's own". .. I guess I'm stickin' to that theory.
Nice solution. I wasted a lot of time on this.
For Sahil: My business object was raising events that a form was subscribing to. WinForm cannot be serialized, or marked as such. Hope this will stop the argument in your head!