What type of objects cannot be serialized?

There are many things that cannot be serialized and it is likely you can understand why.

Objects with members for which serialization would not make sense, such as SqlConnection, cannot be serialized unless you write something that serializes in a way that you need it to.

An object of the Form class cannot be serialized and controls in the Forms namespace cannot be. Perhaps the reason why a form cannot be serialized is because it has so many properties and it woud be inneficient to write all of it out when you need just a small portion of it.

A DataRow cannot be serialized. DataTable and DataSet can be but not DataRow.

Classes that the developer did not mark as serializable are not serializable and they might need more modification before they will be serializable.

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Vulpes15y ago
Accepted answer
AFAIK, any type of object can be serialized provided it is marked with the appropriate attributes.

However, you won't be able serialize objects of anonymous types because they're compiler generated and so cannot be decorated with attributes.
Sam Hobbs15y ago
There are many things that cannot be serialized and it is likely you can understand why.

Objects with members for which serialization would not make sense, such as SqlConnection, cannot be serialized unless you write something that serializes in a way that you need it to.

An object of the Form class cannot be serialized and controls in the Forms namespace cannot be. Perhaps the reason why a form cannot be serialized is because it has so many properties and it woud be inneficient to write all of it out when you need just a small portion of it.

A DataRow cannot be serialized. DataTable and DataSet can be but not DataRow.

Classes that the developer did not mark as serializable are not serializable and they might need more modification before they will be serializable.