[MUD-Dev] Serialization, dealing with changing classes.

[Sean Kelly]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Neil Edwards wrote:

> Hi there, I am currently writing a MUD from scratch in C# for
> learning the language and I enjoy writing MUDs. I was wondering
> how people get round the problem of Serializing objects (to a
> file) who's class may change and make the serialized version
> unreadable.
 
> I have tackled this problem previously with my java MUDs by
> writing XML based files and if something got removed from the
> class or added to it then the XML Parser would just not look for
> the item or give it a default if it didn't exist in the file. I
> was considering doing this again in C# but thought I would see how
> everyone else handled this.

Any file-format would work, provided you allowed for the possible
addition/removal of properties.
 
> Another thought, if I were to switch to OODBMS (recommended?)  are
> there any free implementations such as MySQL that I may use and,
> although less important, that are .NET native or compatible.

I don't know much about it, but Microsoft has a free database engine
called Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) that is supposed to be MS SQL
compatible.  I'm also pretty sure it ships as part of VisualStudio
.NET.  Of the free databases available, this one is the most likely
to be C# compatible.


Sean


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