I’ve been doing a lot of work with the .NET XmlSerializer over the last couple of weeks, and once again I’m wishing I had that just one more custom attribute to work with.  What I’d love to be able to do is just tell the XmlSerializer to let me worry about a specific part of the XML, since I know better than it.

Something like this (to serialize a property called MyString):

      public interface ICustomSerializer

      {

            void DoSerialization(object theValue, XmlTextWriter w);

            void DoDeserialization(XmlNode x, object targetValue)

      }

      public class DataClass

      {

            public DataClass()

            {

            }

            [XmlMyWay(typeof(MySerializer))]

            public string MyString

            {

                  get{ return "OK";}

                  set{}

            }

      }

      [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Property)]

      public class XmlMyWayAttribute : Attribute

      {

            public XmlMyWayAttribute(Type serializer)

            {

            }

      }

      public class MySerializer : ICustomSerializer

      {

            #region ICustomSerializer Members

            public void DoSerialization(object theValue, XmlTextWriter w)

            {

                  // TODO:  Add MySerializer.DoSerialization implementation

            }

            public void DoDeserialization(XmlNode x, object targetValue)

            {

                  // TODO:  Add MySerializer.DoDeserialization implementation

            }

            #endregion

      }

Then you could do whatever funky serialization you needed to do.  Or is this flawed in some fundamental way?  It’d be pretty cool though…