Controlling order of serialization in C#

Question

I'm using an XmlSerializer to serialize an object and write it to a file. I've had quite a bit of success with the serializer doing what I want it to do in terms of nesting elements and what is serialized as elements vs attributes. Unfortunately, I've run into a problem where I need one member of a class to serialize before another. Elsewhere it's worked for me that whatever is declared first gets serialized first, but in this instance I'm not having so much success with that. Is there any way to manually control the order in which things are serialized?

Answer 1

[XmlElementAttribute(Order = 1)] 
public int Field1 {...} 

[XmlElementAttribute(Order = 2)] 
public int Field2 {...} 

Catch: You must specify the Order for all of your members.

Be careful - deserialization will only work if the properties in the XML document are in the same order. Otherwise it will silently ignore out-of-order properties.

Answer 2

XmlElementAttribute.Order, which controls "the explicit order in which the elements are serialized or deserialized".