Since the core application might be abstracted from the presentation layers, most core game objects would have to be serializable to and from a stream. This implies marking an object with SerializableAttribute at the least, so that the member data can be properly serialized. However, this default serialization would mark each piece of data as its variable name, and the variable name could be less than desirable at times. Of course, I could always rename the variable name, but there are times where I probably cannot use my preferred name.

I then search around in the framework to see if there's any serialization attribute where I can actually specify the name I want the variable to be serialized as. Surprisely I found none, except for xml serialization. Those attributes can't be carried over to soap nor binary serialization, so I had to forgo those.

Not finding such an attribute, I decided to create my own, as well as helpers to serialize all marked variables in a class. Now, I would have to inherit from ISerializable, and implement both the constructor and GetObjectData methods to make a class serializable.

I'll explain the reasoning for custom names in my next post...