Turns out his victim was found floating in a tub full of corn flakes and milk. Bahhh, dahhh, dahhh, da.

Anyway, in this case it was more that the serializer got killed…by an uncoöperative class. (BTW, that’s not an umlaut over the second “o”. It’s a diaeresis. Lovely sounding term. More on the subject: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis.html). Typically, this happens because the class has a constructor with parameters. I couldn’t get around that. Well, I don’t want to anyway. I also didn’t want to depart from my vanilla JSON serializer, although in the past I’ve found SilverlightSerializer to be a solution when all else fails…like serializing an entire model. (Why would you want to do that? Long story, for some other time).

The solution is to simply mark up the class with the DataContract attribute and use DataMember for each of the members you want to serialize. In my case, this had the advantage of not serializing a voluminous sub-list I don’t want included. And it allows this class to be used in several places, rather than creating a separate Dictionary or similar.

[DataContract]
public class Exercise
{
 public List<Asset> AssetsList;

public Exercise(int id, int order, string description)
 {
 Id = id;

Order = order;

Description = description;

AssetsList = new List<Asset>();
 }

[DataMember]
 public int Id { get; set; }

[DataMember]
 public int Order { get; set; }

[DataMember]
 public string Description { get; set; }
}

And, voila, we end up with something that can be saved to IsolatedStorage:

[{“Description”:”JUMPING JACKS”,”Id”:0,”Order”:0},{“Description”:”WALL SIT”,”Id”:1,”Order”:1},{“Description”:”PUSH UPS”,”Id”:2,”Order”:2},{“Description”:”CRUNCHES”,”Id”:3,”Order”:3},{“Description”:”STEP UPS”,”Id”:4,”Order”:4},{“Description”:”SQUATS”,”Id”:5,”Order”:5},{“Description”:”TRICEPS DIP”,”Id”:6,”Order”:6},{“Description”:”PLANK”,”Id”:7,”Order”:7},{“Description”:”HIGH KNEES”,”Id”:8,”Order”:8},{“Description”:”LUNGES”,”Id”:9,”Order”:9},{“Description”:”PUSH UP & ROTATE”,”Id”:10,”Order”:10},{“Description”:”SIDE PLANK”,”Id”:11,”Order”:11}]