AppFabric Caching - Can I specify serialization style used for all objects? - serialization

Question

An object which implements some custom serialization can be serialized and deserialized to different formats, for example to Xml or byte[].
I have run into a problem where when I put to cache, AppFabric runs the IXmlSerializable implementation on a class when I would rather force it to go with binary. AppFabric Caching - What are its serialization and deserialization requirements for an object?
Can I configure this?
(At the moment the workaround is to serialize the object programatically to a byte[] and then send that into the cache, reversing the process on the way out).

Answer 1

In the MSDN documentation it says we could implement IDataCacheObjectSerializer to achieve this goal. You can read about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh552969.aspx
class MySerializer : IDataCacheObjectSerializer
{
public object Deserialize(System.IO.Stream stream)
{
// Deserialize the System.IO.Stream 'stream' from
// the cache and return the object
}
public void Serialize(System.IO.Stream stream, object value)
{
// Serialize the object 'value' into a System.IO.Stream
// that can be stored in the cache
}
}
Afer that, you can set the custom serializer to the DataCacheFactory:
DataCacheFactoryConfiguration configuration = new DataCacheFactoryConfiguration();
configuration.SerializationProperties =
new DataCacheSerializationProperties(DataCacheObjectSerializerType.CustomSerializer,
new MyNamespace.MySerializer());
// Assign other DataCacheFactoryConfiguration properties...
// Then create a DataCacheFactory with this configuration
DataCacheFactory factory = new DataCacheFactory(configuration);
Hope this helps.