Serialization Assembly. Is it needed or not?

Question

I have a .net 2.0 c# ClickOnce app and it connects to its data via Web Services. I've been told that one way to potentially speed up the application is to generate a serialization assembly beforehand. I have several questions on this front.

1. The default setting to whether to generate a serialization assembly is Auto. What criteria does VS2005 use to decide whether to generate a serialization assembly or not? It seems like it does not generate under Debug configuration, but it does under Release configuration, but I can't tell for sure and can't the information anywhere.

2. Does serialization assembly actually improve the startup of the application? Specifically what does it improve? Do I actually need a serialization assembly?

Solution 1

It is really asking "Shall I pre-generate the serialization assemblies and include it in the deployed project or shall I fall back on the default of generating the assemblies on the fly?" Generally that won't hurt too much after the first hit perf-wise. Where it can play in is that the serialization assemblies are generated in %SYSTEMROOT%\TEMP. Which, in some cases, the process can't access, leading to fatal exceptions in most cases.

Solution 2

This is not relevant to your situation, but there's another good reason for pre-generating the serialization assembly - it's necessary when hosting your code in SQL Server (i.e. SQLCLR). SQL Server doesn't allow these assemblies to be generated dynamically, so your serialization code would fail inside SQL Server.

Solution 3

In most cases, you aren't likely to see a huge benefit from this, especially if you keep the app open for a while. Pre-generating a serialization assembly mainly helps the first time (in an exe lifetime) that you serialize a specific type as xml.

Solution 4

According to Intellitrace, only the first time you XML-serialize a type, a FileNotFoundException is thrown and then caught. This means CLR expects to load an assembly containing all the XML-Serializers for that specific Assembly and when it's not found, a FileNotFoundException is thrown to signal the XmlSerializer: "Hey! Generate the darn assembly!" and this is what happens during that "Catch" and then the previously not found file exists.

I've read somewhere that using try-catch for logic is a bad exercise. IDK why Microsoft has used this approach...

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