Interop vs. Serialize

I was this close to just using ISerializable for by binary representation for networking. But then talking to n8, i decided that leaving the door open for java interop was important enough in Enterprise computing, that I couldn’t ignore it.

So, I’m back to coming up with my packet structure in manner that i can easily serialize by hand. Right now the plan is something along the line of a fixed sized header followed by a variable sized gzip-Xml chunk and a variable sized raw data chunk. Both of the variable chunks can be 0 length. The header is used for expressing the purpose of the packet, and describing the offsets of the variable packets. The gzip-Xml is for data that the recipient is supposed to parse and act on, while the raw data packet will be just that, raw data that i sued to construct a complete file.

I need to dig up the test code i did for doing manual serialization in .NET. Really, just what would be done in C with a struct and memcpy, but of course, since in C# you don’t have pointers and the memory is managed for you, it’s a bit more of a hoop jumping exercise. The code is on another machine, so i’ll leave that for another post.