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Is there a way to view the metadata and property information for a serialized object without knowing what it serializes to?

I have a bunch of binary serialized objects and need to data mine but I don't have access to the original classes. Now, it's possible to define dummy classes to populate the data with but without knowing what information is held in the deserialized objects I've no way of validating if I'm missing any of the properties.

John Saunders
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Jake
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  • unfortunately it's not xml – T McKeown Mar 07 '14 at 21:42
  • do you have the runtime assemblies or do you have nothing? – T McKeown Mar 07 '14 at 21:49
  • if you at least have the assemblies you should be able to deserialize and do a .GetType() to figure out the class. – T McKeown Mar 07 '14 at 21:51
  • unfotunately not bro.. because when u receive at the receiving side its just an object and u cannot do anything with it unless you deserialize it to its exact class.. – rummykhan Mar 07 '14 at 22:50
  • @TMcKeown I do have the assemblies and have been using reflection to find underlying fields but it seems like a very error prone method – Jake Mar 10 '14 at 15:31
  • @rummykhan Not true, as stated in the initial post I've been populating classes with similar fields successfully to pull out the data. I just cannot verify that I'm getting everything. – Jake Mar 10 '14 at 15:33

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The only hint of a solution I found was an archived webpage created by an enthusiast to understand binary serialization. It is by no means official/complete but it looks like the best solution so far.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120625224455/http://primates.ximian.com/~lluis/dist/binary_serialization_format.htm

Jake
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