Version Tolerant Serialization between 2.0 and 1.1

We are in the process to migrate a solution from .NET Framework V1.1 to V2.0.

The system consists of several services, located on different computers, and using .NET remoting with binary serialization to communicate.

Due to the nature of the distributed system, we are not able to upgrade each system at the same time. This leads to the requirement that the serialization needs to be version tolerant in both directions.

Meanwhile, the following serialization problems occurred, when calling a remote method on a V1.1 server from a V2.0 client:

- DataSet

When passing a DataSet, a "SerializationException: Type is not resolved for member System.Data.SerializationFormat"-exception occurs on the server during deserialization.

This happens because the new RemotingFormat data member is provided in the SerializationInfo and cannot be deserialized.

This problem can be solved by deriving an own DataSet class from System.Data.DataSet, implementing ISerializable.GetObjectData and filling the SerializationInfo with the XmlSchema and XmlDiffGram values only.

The drawback is, that each DataSet being passed to a remoting server (or back to the caller as response) must be an instance of this DataSet.

- DateTime

When passing a DateTime value, an "ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Ticks must be between DateTime.MinValue.Ticks and DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks"-exception occurs during deserialization.

Because the DateTime structure is sealed, the method mentioned above for the DataSet cannot be applied.

The following article explains the Version Tolerant Serialization of the .NET Framework 2.0 and states:

Does anybody now whether this patch is already available or when it will be, or are there any other suggestions or workarounds to deal with this kind of problem

Regards,

Christoph