«
»

Quickly Clone a Serializable Object in C#

Here’s a quick way to get a clone of your serializable object in C#:

public static object GetClone(object cloneThis)
{
BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
MemoryStream ms= new MemoryStream();
bf.Serialize(ms, cloneThis);
ms.Flush();
ms.Position = 0;
return bf.Deserialize(ms);
}

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 4:17 AM and is filed under C#. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Quickly Clone a Serializable Object in C#”

  1. Rahul Dantkale says:
    January 30, 2008 at 2:38 PM

    Nice trick to Clone… this reduced my manual clone method from 100s of lines to 6..

    Gud one

  2. galaktor^ says:
    August 20, 2009 at 7:22 PM

    Nice. I suggest adding a check to the method:

    if( !cloneThis.GetType().IsSerializable )
    {
    throw new ArgumentException( “Object must be serializable.”);
    }

  3. greg says:
    August 21, 2009 at 5:37 AM

    Great idea – thanks galaktor

  4. auser says:
    January 11, 2010 at 1:14 PM

    I really liked your method. thanks for sharing this:) hope many people will find it useful as I did. have read lots of articles on the topic, but have never thought that could be so easy

  5. Sophi says:
    January 23, 2010 at 10:10 PM

    Is it deep clone?

Leave a Reply