Serialization with protobuf-net

protobuf-net is an open source .net implementation of Google's 'protocol buffer' binary serialization format.

Consider the following classes, I have included a sub-class to make it slightly more than a non-trivial example

public class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
    public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; }
    public Address Address { get; set; }
}

public class Address
{
    public string Number { get; set; }
    public string StreetName { get; set; }
}

public class ExtendedAddress : Address
{
    public string BuildingName { get; set; }
}

With v2 of protobuf-net you can build a serializer on the fly:

var protobufModel = ProtoBuf.Meta.TypeModel.Create();
AddTypeToModel<Person>(protobufModel);
AddTypeToModel<Address>(protobufModel).AddSubType(500, typeof(ExtendedAddress));
AddTypeToModel<ExtendedAddress>(protobufModel);

private MetaType AddTypeToModel<T>(RuntimeTypeModel typeModel)
{            
    var properties = typeof(T).GetProperties().Select(p => p.Name).ToArray();
    return typeModel.Add(typeof(T), true).Add(properties);            
}