Version control a protobuf-net serialised C# object

Question

I have serialized a C# class using protobuf-net. The resultant byte array is stored in a database. This is for performance reasons and I probably won't be able to change this design. The C# language doesn't make it possible to prevent classes being modified, and the class structure being passed in for deserialization with time may require changes that will not match that used for serialization, causing retrieval to fail.

Other than the wrapper technique suggested here, is there a pattern or technique for handling this kind of problem?

Answer 1

The only othe technique that comes to my mind is to version the classes that need to be deserialized in order to not loose anything when you need to make some changes. When you serialize an instance of those classes, you have to serialize also the version of the class (it could be a field of the the class itself).

I don't think this is the best solution but a solution. The versioning strategy could become very difficult to manage when the changes (and the versions) start to grow.