Refactoring the namespace of a class with a DataContract

Question

Let's say I have the following classes:

namespace A.B.C
{
    [DataContract]
    public Data
    {
          [DataMember] public int Value1 {get;set;}
          [DataMember] public double Value2 {get;set;}
          [DataMember] public MyClass Value3 {get;set;}
    }
}

namespace X.Y.Z
{
    [DataContract]
    public Dataset
    {
        [DataMember] public Data Data1 {get;set;}
        [DataMember] public int Data2 {get;set;}
        // ...
    }
}

I haven been serializing and deserializing Dataset objects with the default DataContractSerializer. Now, during refactoring I changed the namespace of Data from A.B.C to A.B.C.D and deserialization no longer works: The DataMembers of Data are all 0.

I tried to fix this by adding the old namespace to the DataContract:

namespace A.B.C.D
{
    [DataContract(Namespace = "A.B.C")]
    public Data
    {
          [DataMember] public int Value1 {get;set;}
          [DataMember] public double Value2 {get;set;}
          [DataMember] public MyClass Value3 {get;set;}
    }
}

But that does not fix it. I also tried a clean rebuild and redeploy (Windows Store App), just in case, but still nothing.

How do I fix the deserialization?

Answer 1

If the namespace is not specified explicitly, it is prefixed. What you do need is to decorate the class with something like:

[DataContract(Namespace = "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/A.B.C")]