XmlSerializerFactory Is Pretty Cool

The XmlSerializerFactory is a new class in .NET 2.0 that provides a factory pattern over the XmlSerializer.  It maintains the cache of generated assemblies so that you can avoid the XmlSerializer leaks.  Usage doesn't impact your code much at all.

Here is a quick demo that I threw together.  I pulled up my blog's RSS feed and saved it into my Visual Studio project as "XmlFile1.xml".  I then created a schema from it (in Visual Studio, use the "XML/Create Schema" menu item).  Using the schema, I created a serializable class from that schema.  This is simple using the command line tools:

xsd.exe /classes xmlfile1.xsd xmlfile11.xsd xmlfile12.xsd xmlfile13.xsd

The result was a set of XML serializable classes that are already decorated with the appropriate attributes for serialization.  The last step is to use the serializable classes with the XmlSerializer.

public rss GetFeed(Uri location)
{
XmlSerializerFactory factory = new XmlSerializerFactory();
XmlSerializer ser = factory.CreateSerializer(typeof(rss));
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(location);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();
rss feed = (rss)ser.Deserialize(responseStream);
responseStream.Close();
return feed;
}

A bonus is that in .NET 2.0, the generated types will have public properties by default, which enables rapid UI development using data binding.  I created a Windows Form with a grid and used the new databinding features to bind to the generated XML serializable classes, using the ObjectDataSource control.  The result is that my UI code is drastically reduced to create a simple grid UI that displays the data:


rss feed = GetFeed(new Uri("http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/rss.aspx"));           
this.dataGridView1.DataSource = feed.channel.item;
this.Text = feed.channel.title + " - " + feed.channel.description;