posted on Wednesday, March 01, 2006 10:53 PM
by
johnwood
Cloning through Serialization
You don't have to implement ICloneable in order to clone objects. Any objects that are marked as serializable (by the [Serializable] attribute or implementing ISerializable) can also be effectively 'cloned' by serializing the object to a memory stream, and then deserializing back to a new copy of the original object.
I use this code to achieve this. You simply pass in the object that supports serialization and it returns a clone.
/// <summary>
/// Performs cloning through serialization
/// </summary>
public static object Clone(object obj)
{
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
bf.Serialize(ms, obj);
ms.Flush();
ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
return bf.Deserialize(ms);
}
Perhaps you might find it useful too.