Maybe you faced the situation where you had code that was to be used on your server side services and also on your silverlight clients.
Having this situation required some tricks because Silverlight Class libraries could not be used on .NET projects and viceversa.
Common workarounds were to share files and use precompilation directive iack!!
Well VS 2011 has a concept called Portable Class Libraries which allow you to create class libraries that can be use in Windows Phone, Silverlight, .NET framework, etc.
And if you have VS 2010 you don't have to suffer. Just use the Portable Library Tools from from the VS Extensions and start sharing code (see this image form the VS Extensions site)
For more details about Portable Libraries check the MSDN documentation page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg597391.aspx
While solving a bug with a custom class that extended the System.Data.DataSet class, I found a situation where the class implemented, the ISerializable interface, but for some reason, during the call to the base.GetObjectData in my serialization code it was trying to get the value of some properties that caused an exception.
The reason was that those properties were not “ready” because my serialization code had not finish initializing the object. But why was the Dataset.GetObjectData trying to get or set those values.
It seems that there is some code in the dataset that used reflection to get the object properties and try to serialize them. I did not want that.
How could I stop the framework from doing that?
I thought of the NonSerializable attribute but that works only on fields and what I have is a property.
I thought of the XmlIgnore attribute but it had no effect.
Why!!!!
Well I finally found that you can add a couple of (not attributes) methods to your component.
They should be named Reset<Property>() and ShouldSerialize<Property>() and returning a boolean value
from these functions will control if the properties are serialized or not.
For more info see MSDN page for ShouldSerialize