Why is the BinaryFormatter output's size so high

Question

Hi there,
given this example:
class Program
void Main(string[] args)
myFoo = new foo(string.Empty,
string.Empty);
BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
MemoryStream memstream =new MemoryStream();
bf.Serialize(memstream, myFoo);
byte[] bytes = memstream.ToArray();
Console.WriteLine(bytes.Length.ToString());
Console.ReadKey();
[Serializable]
class foo
private string foo1;
private string foo2;
public foo(string s1, string s2)
foo1 = s1;
foo2 = s2;
Why do I get an Arrylength of 142 bytes although I am serializing a simple class with two empty strings. And wouldn´t it be much more efficient to write my own serializer with Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes , etc...
Thank you for your answers
 

Answer 1

Ok, I think I expressed myself in a wrong way. I didn´t consider my approach to serialise an object to be more efficient than the BinaryFormatter class. But the resulting byte package is much more smaller in my approach in terms of size. So when I use encoding.ASCII
I get 1 byte for every character of the strings. Wouldn´t that be better in case I have to send this package over a network for example. Of course I have to make sure that there are some kinds of seperators between the strings and I have to provide a deserialise
and serialise methode on both sides. Please correct me if I am wrong.
But anyways thank you for your answer