Hiding fields and Serializing

[G. Harland]

I have a web service with a class. Here is an excerpt.

Public Class User_Input
Public Phone_AreaCode as String
Public Phone_Exchange as String
Public Phone_Num as String
Friend Phone_Number as String
End Class

The calling client insists on formatting the phone number in three fields.
My application requires the phone in one field. So that the client doesn't
somehow set the phone_number, I used the Friend modifier. Works great on
their end - they cannot see it through intellisense and cannot set a value
into it. My web service then appends the three fields into phone_number.
Everything is going swimmingly until I try to serialize my class into XML for
transport to a COM+ component that is expecting an XML string.

I don't get the Friend phone_number field. And I did see in the help that
the XMLSerializer only processes public stuff. I suppose I could turn
phone_number into Public and then write a lot of code to test to see which
fields they used before doing my append. I'd rather not, but if that is my
only option, so be it.

So, any ideas on how to hide fields from the client and still get them
XMLSerialized would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
G. Harland