I am trying to migrate existing code that uses XmlSerializer to protobuf-net due to the increased performance it offers, however I am having problems with this specific case.

I have an object[] that includes parameters that are going to be sent to a remote host (sort of a custom mini rpc facility). I know the set of types from which these parameters can be, but I cannot tell in advance in which order they are going to be sent. I have three constraints. The first is that I am running in Compact Framework, so I need something that works there. Second, as I mentioned performance is a big concern (on the serializing side) so I would rather avoid using a lot of reflection there if possible. And the most important is that I care about the order in which this parameters were sent. Using XmlSerializer it was easy just adding XmlInclude, but for fields there is nothing equivalent as far as I know in Protobuf-net. So, is there a way to do this? Here is a simplified example.

    [Serializable]
    [XmlInclude(typeof(MyType1)),
     XmlInclude(typeof(MyType2)),
     XmlInclude(typeof(MyType3))
    public class Message()
    {
         public object[] parameters;

         public Message(object[] parms)
         {
             parameters = parms; 
         }
    }

    Message m = new Message(new object[] {MyType1(), 33, "test", 
                new MyType3(), new MyType3()});
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
    XmlSerializer xml = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Message));
    xml.Serialize(ms,xml);

That will just work with XmlSerializer, but if I try to convert it to protobuf-net I will get a "No default encoding for Object" message.

The best I came up with is to use generics and [ProtoInclude] as seen in this example. Since I can have different object types within the array this doesn't quite make it. I added a generic List for each potential type and a property with [ProtoIgnore] with type object[] to add them and get them. I have to use reflection when adding them (to know in which array to put each item) which is not desirable and I still can't preserve the ordering as I just extract all the items on each list one by one and put them into a new object[] array on the property get.

I wonder if there is a way to accomplish this?