How to write a comment to an XML file when using the XmlSerializer?

Question

I have an object Foo which I serialize to an XML stream.

public class Foo {
  // The application version, NOT the file version!
  public string Version {get         


        

Answer 1

Proposed solution by user dbc looks fine, however it seems to need more manual work to create such comments than using an XmlWriter that knows how to insert comments based on XmlComment attributes.

See https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=xmlcomment - it seems you can pass such a writer to XmlSerializer and thus not have to implement your own serialization which could be tricky.

I did myself end up using dbc's solution though, nice and clean with no extra code. See https://dotnetfiddle.net/Bvbi0N. Make sure you provide a "set" accessor for the comment element (the XmlAnyElement). It doesn't need to have a name btw.

Update: better pass a unique name always, aka use [XmlAnyElement("someCommentElement")] instead of [XmlAnyElement]. Was using the same class with WCF and it was choking upon those XmlAnyElements that didn't have a name provided, even though I had [XmlIgnore, SoapIgnore, IgnoreDataMember] at all of them.