Why is the public property not being serialized? - wcf

Question

We have a WCF service which includes Serializable classes in a contract that has DataContract and DataMember at the root level of the service.
While trying to build a solution to isolate the problem, I came across the following:
[ServiceContract]
public interface IService1
{
[OperationContract]
CompositeType GetDataUsingDataContract();
}
[DataContract]
public class CompositeType
{
[DataMember]
public MyType MyProperty { get; set; }
}
[Serializable]
public class MyType
{
private int amount1;
[XmlElement(Form = XmlSchemaForm.Unqualified, DataType = "int", ElementName = "AmountN")]
public int Amount1
{
get
{ return amount1; }
set
{ amount1 = value; }
}
}
Gives the following xsd:
<xs:complexType name="CompositeType">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="MyProperty" type="tns:MyType" nillable="true" minOccurs="0"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType><xs:element name="CompositeType" type="tns:CompositeType" nillable="true"/>
<xs:complexType name="MyType">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="amount1" type="xs:int"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:element name="MyType" type="tns:MyType" nillable="true"/>
</xs:schema>
Question is: Why is the private but not the public member being serialized?

Answer 1

Serializers and serialization attributes are two different things.
XmlElement is attribute for XmlSerializer but it has no meaning for DataContractSerializer or for BinaryFormatter. XmlElementAttribute Class
DataContractSerializer can serialize multiple types, but it uses own serialization algorithm Link. When serializing objects marked with [Serializable],
DataContractSerializer follows default serialization pattern (serializing all members, [NonSerialized] applies). If you need more control then you can implement ISerializable for custom serialization and then you can set node names and values in serialized object Serialization .
There is also an option to implement IXmlSerializable and have full control on how serialized object will look like.

Answer 2

This msdn article can explain, why wcf is able to serialize your MyType:
Types Supported by the Data Contract Serializer: . . .
Types marked with the SerializableAttribute attribute. Many types
included in the .NET Framework base class library fall into this
category. The DataContractSerializer fully supports this serialization
programming model that was used by .NET Framework remoting, the
BinaryFormatter, and the SoapFormatter, including support for the
ISerializable interface.
And since wcf have no problem to serialize private fields, probably this is the reason of serializing your privet field amount1.
INO, The question is "why your property Amount1 was not serialized?" I'd try to rename it (be different from field name), remove xml attributes on it, and re-try.