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BinaryFormatter serialization of custom BuildEventArgs and ITaskItems removed for .NET 7

  • Article

MSBuild in .NET 7 doesn't support serialization of custom BuildEventArgs-derived and ITaskItem-derived types via the BinaryFormatter serializer.

Version introduced

MSBuild 17.4 (.NET SDK 7.0.100)

Old behavior

MSBuild used BinaryFormatter to preserve custom types that derived from BuildEventArgs and ITaskItem across certain boundaries, most notably when running in a multi-process environment.

New behavior

MSBuild will no longer support this mechanism, so code that used custom types derived from BuildEventArgs and ITaskItem may fail.

Reason for change

BinaryFormatter was made obsolete in .NET 5. Per this plan, all first-party code in the dotnet GitHub organization must migrate away from its use by .NET 7. This change impacts user-exposed functionality of MSBuild.

  • Engage with the MSBuild team on this GitHub discussion about your specific use cases and how you can migrate away from the TranslateDotNet mechanism.

  • Avoid returning custom derived types from tasks or when logging.