I was trying to do the same thing and discovered that after you call the Serialize function, you must call Close on the stream. For example, your code would be:

XmlSerializer stringSerial = new XmlSerializer(typeof(string));
string metName = “SomeString”;
stringSerial.Serialize(netStream, metName);
netStream.Close();

That will allow the server to finish the read. It appears to be waiting for the stream to finish before finalizing the deserialization on the server’s end.

I’ve trying this serialization code with TcpListener and TcpClient to interprocess communication in a same pocket pc.
Both client and server sockets seems to be ok, but when debugging they seems to be in deadlock. A small code excerpt from client and server is below:
//server:
TcpListener listener = new TcpListener(IPAddress.Loopback, port);
listener.Start();
TcpClient myClient = listener.AcceptTcpClient();
XmlSerializer stringSerial = new XmlSerializer(typeof(string));
string methodName = (string)stringSerial.Deserialize(netStream);
XmlSerializer boolSerial = new XmlSerializer(typeof(bool));
result = true;
boolSerial.Serialize(netStream, result);
listener.Stop();
//client
TcpClient client = new TcpClient(IPAddress.Loopback.ToString(), port);
NetworkStream netStream = client.GetStream();
XmlSerializer stringSerial = new XmlSerializer(typeof(string));
string metName = “SomeString”;
stringSerial.Serialize(netStream, metName);
bool resultOk = (bool)boolSerial.Deserialize(netStream);

What happens is, Serialize from client happens and then it ways for Deserialize. However, server nevers identify that the Serialize was made, and waits forever on the Deserialize.
Is this the kind of problem you refer when working with serialization on .Net Framework?

Regards,

I think you are considering serializing only as a means of freezing and reconstituting objects. In that case, sure that can’t work across languages. But serializing or marshaling is just representing object data and structure in a different format. In this case an XML format is one that can be used by other tools much more easily than a binary one.

You are wrong Geoff,
The XML serializer is as useless as Binary one on different platform because there is NO STANDARDS on the serialization/deserialization. Only SOAP – which is very inefficient and limited. Using XML serializer on another platform only allows for adjusting your MANUALLY built serializer because the stream (text) can be read. But you can do the same with a binary one. The only difference is that the stream can not be viewed by a primitive text editor. That is a common misconception.