Beginner question: objects

[Jeff Johnson]

I would like to pass a generic System.Object to a web method. The actual
object will be of a derived class and will not always be the same class.
However, in my initial attempt I got errors saying "<specifc object type>
not expected." Are Web services unable to "ignore" the object type when
passing things around? If so, I may need to resort to Remoting instead
(assuming THAT will work).

 

[Jeff Johnson]

I would like to pass a generic System.Object to a web method. The actual
object will be of a derived class and will not always be the same class.
However, in my initial attempt I got errors saying "<specifc object type>
not expected." Are Web services unable to "ignore" the object type when
passing things around? If so, I may need to resort to Remoting instead
(assuming THAT will work).

Hmmm, it appears like I may be out of luck, because apparently at some point
in the serialization process the program (Web service or Remoting server)
needs to know about the concrete class that the object is based on and that
just isn't an option in my case. I've gone a different route, which is to
have the client serialize the object itself (I was hoping to avoid this) and
then simply pass the Web service a byte array. It's too bad there isn't an
Object.ToByteArray() method....