Clone any object in vb 6.0

[Cathode Follower]

Cloning in vb6 was always a pain. It was so easy to get the code wrong, and the problems it caused were endless - normally stack overflow.
In .Net you do not have to do any cloning any more - you can simply serialise the object and then copy it into the target object. The technique is quite widely used and described - but it is interesting to use it with generics, as it means that you can use it anywhere in your application. Here is a code sample showing what to do:

Public Function CloneObject(Of T)(ByVal obj As T) As T
        Try
            Dim stream As New MemoryStream(1024)
            Dim formatter As New BinaryFormatter()
            formatter.Serialize(stream, obj)
            stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin) ' go back to the start
            CloneObject = DirectCast(formatter.Deserialize(stream), T) 'get new object
            stream.Close() ' clear down the memory
        Catch excGeneric As Exception
            ReportException(excGeneric)
        End Try
    End Function
 

You have to change your class declarations to be serializable to use this code:

<Serializable()> Friend Class ChargeUnitType
 

The call to clone any object looks similar to this:

Dim objClonedType As ChargeUnitType = CloneObject(ChargeUnitType) 
 

Occasionally, for reasons I do not understand, the code fails on trying to deserialize, but for these cases, on the advice of Microsoft, I have included the following code in the object being serialized, and the problem has gone away:

 Friend Sub New(ByVal info As SerializationInfo, ByVal context As StreamingContext)
        MyBase.New(info, context)
    End Sub
 

[Cathode Follower]

Sorry I got the title wrong. The example and description refers to .NET ! Woops.