protobuf-net

protobuf-net is a free-to-use contract-based serializer designed to help computer programmers systematically develop .NET projects. Although it writes information in the "protocol buffers" serialization format (created by Google), it uses a different API, which is based on regular .NET patterns.

It offers support for many .NET-based platforms, including .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5, Mono 2.x, as well as Microsoft Silverlight 2.

The tool utilizes several attributes for configuring the environment and requires contract types to be explicitly defined. For instance, it can view types marked as [DataContract], [ProtoContract] or [XmlType]. Out of these three, [ProtoContract] permits greater control, because it has the role of a library-specific attribute.

"SkipConstructor" temporarily disables the type's constructor during deserialization, "UseProtomembersOnly" ignores members which are not marked as [ProtoMember] in a multi-attribute type, while "IgnoreListHandling" applies instance instead of list rules, even when the type seems to be a list.

In addition to information about contract types, you can check out details about members, inheritance, enumeration types, callbacks and identifiers, along with tutorials and examples (data serialization and deserialization written in C#) at the developer's website.