Is there a way to avoid the XmlSerializer to not initialize a null property when deserializing?

Question

I have this class:

public class MySerializableClass
{
    public List MyList { get; set; }
}

If MyList is null when MySeria

Answer 1

This looks like a bug...

Even if you try to mark the property as nullable, it doesn't seem to work.

[XmlArray(IsNullable = true)]
public List MyList { get; set; }

It serializes the MyList property as follows :

So the XML clearly indicates that the list is null, but after deserialization, it is still initialized to an empty list...

If you replace List with MyObject[], it works fine (even without IsNullable = true), but it's probably not what you want...

You should probably report this on Connect.