ByteSerialization

A declarative serialization library designed for bit-perfect 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.

Example

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