This is a fork of the protobuf-net library, written by Marc Gravell, with a small number of fixes we have applied to fix some bugs and improve performance, shared here in the hope that others will find them useful.

protobuf-net is a binary serialization engine, along similar lines to BinaryFormatter but using the "protocol buffers" [PB] specification as laid out by Google.

The core protobuf-net library is a single dll; other projects are presented for testing and example purposes.

Many PB implementations start with a .proto text file (describing the types), with the developer running a command-line tool to generate code in their target language. Deliberately, protobuf-net started the other way around: it is designed to work with existing .NET types at runtime. This allows you to use your existing data objects, but still with lots of optimisations to keep things very fast.

There is a C# code generation version (courtesy of Jon Skeet), and a proposed future extension is to allow generation of protobuf-net classes from a .proto file.