Yet another blog about WPF, Surface, SL, MVVM, NUI....

You often read on the web that the DependencyObjects are not marked as serializable and that this is a major drawback of them...



But there is a easy way to perform a serialization of these object : use XAMLWriter and XAMLReader :

public class MyDependencyObject : DependencyObject
{
public static readonly DependencyProperty MyDependencyPropertyProperty =
  DependencyProperty.Register("MyDependencyProperty", typeof(String), typeof(MyDependencyObject));
 
  public String MyDependencyProperty
  {
    get { return (String)GetValue(MyDependencyObject.MyDependencyPropertyProperty); }
    set { SetValue(MyDependencyObject.MyDependencyPropertyProperty, value); }
  }
 
}
 
...
 
MyDependencyObject obj = new MyDependencyObject();
obj.MyDependencyProperty = "One love";
String serializedString = XamlWriter.Save(obj);
Console.WriteLine(serializedString);

It will produce something like this :

<MyDependencyObject MyDependencyProperty="One love" xmlns="clr-namespace:ANTOINE.Jonathan;assembly=ANTOINE.Jonathan" />