A declarative serialization library designed for bit-level control over binary representation. You can define C# classes like C structs by assigning attributes to classes and properties. Inspired by BinarySerializer by Jeff Haynes.
This library was created from the ground up to support features like references/pointers.
Notably, this libary is used by swe1r-assets.
Consider the following classes:
public class Manufacturer
{
[Order(0)]
public byte NameLength { get; set; }
[Order(1), Length(nameof(NameLength))]
public char[] Name { get; set; }
}
public class Car
{
[Order(0)]
public byte NameLength { get; set; }
[Order(1), Length(nameof(NameLength))]
public char[] Name { get; set; }
[Order(2), Reference]
public Manufacturer Manufacturer { get; set; }
}Create an object graph like this:
var mf = new Manufacturer() { NameLength = 2, Name = "MF".ToArray() };
var car = new Car() { NameLength = 4, Name = "Car1".ToArray(), Manufacturer = mf };
using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
new ByteSerializer().Serialize(ms, car, Endianness.BigEndian);
File.WriteAllBytes("car.bin", ms.ToArray());
}That gives you the following binary output:
$ xxd car.bin
00000000: 0443 6172 3100 0000 0902 4d46 .Car1.....MF| Bytes | Property | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 04 | car.NameLength | 4 |
| 43 61 72 31 | car.Name | "Car1" in ASCII |
| 00 00 00 09 | car.Manufacturer | (pointer to mf) |
| 02 | mf.NameLength | 2 |
| 4d 46 | mf.Name | "MF" in ASCII |