Talk Nerdy To Me

Okay, so I blogged about how C# BindingList<T> serialization is broken and how to fix it. The problem centers around filling a BindingList subtype with items that implement INotifyPropertyChanged. This enables your list to fire ListChanged events indicating ItemChanged whenever a property of a list item changes. Unfortunately, serializing and deserializing the list causes the ItemChanged notification to stop firing unless you take steps to properly rebuild the list. This happens because C# event handlers aren’t serializable, and .NET fails to rewire the listeners.

A colleague of mine asked for a quick example to demonstrate the problem, so I whipped up this test case.

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I previously blogged about how to use the C# INotifyPropertyChanged interface with BindingList<T> instances so that your lists properly fire the ListChanged event with a ListChangedType of ItemChanged.

In that post, I also alluded to the fact that BindingList<T> is flawed with regard to serialization of BindingList<T> subtypes. The problem has to do with the fact that BindingList<T> listens for PropertyChanged events on any of its list items that implement INotifyPropertyChanged. However, because event handlers are not serializable, those listener connections are lost during the serialization process for subtypes, and they don’t get rewired when the list is deserialized. It’s straightforward to do that, but the implementation is missing from the .NET SDK, so we have to write it ourselves.

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After reading Bil Simser’s discussion on DataTable vs. BindingList<T>, I’m convinced that BindingList<T> is the way to go for representing domain objects in C#. However, effective use of BindingList does require a certain amount of planning and forethought on the part of the developer. There are a number of things you can do to increase your chances of success with BindingList, but this post is about having your list items implement INotifyPropertyChanged in order to propagate change events through the BindingList itself.

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