serialize an object for use by drag & drop

[misterbear]

Hello, I posted a similar question a couple of days ago, got some advice but don't seem to be able to make this one work anyway. Here is the problem: I have a custom class derived from treenode that I want to be able to perform drag'n'drop on to another instance of the same application. I want to serialize the treenode so I implement the ISerializable interface and add a constructor taking a SerializationInfo and a StreamingContext parameter The class essentially looks like this: [Serializable()] public class InheritedTreeNode : TreeNode, ISerializable { bool bool_property1, bool_property2, bool_property3; string string_property4; public InheritedTreeNode() : base() {} ... } here's what the serialization code in the InheritedTreeNode does: public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) { // Serialize all properties of this item info.AddValue("bool_property1", typeof(bool)); info.AddValue("bool_property2", typeof(bool)); info.AddValue("bool_property3", typeof(bool)); info.AddValue("string_property4", typeof(string)); // serialize all it's children ArrayList al = new ArrayList(); foreach(InheritedTreeNode itn in this.Nodes) al.Add(mc2); info.AddValue("Nodes", typeof(ArrayList)); } ...and here is how it is Deserialized: public InheritedTreeNode(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base() { this.bool_property1 = info.GetBoolean("bool_property1"); this.bool_property2 = info.GetBoolean("bool_property2"); this.bool_property3 = info.GetBoolean("bool_property3"); this.string_property4 = info.GetString("string_property4"); // copy all child nodes ArrayList al = (ArrayList)info.GetValue( "Nodes", typeof(ArrayList) ); foreach(MyTreeNode2 mc2 in al) Nodes.Add(mc2); } now for drag'n'drop i do this: BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter(); MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(); bf.serialize(ms, instance_of_a_tree_node); DataObject dObj = new DataObject("InheritedTreeNode", ms) theTreeView.DoDragDrop( dObj, DragDropEffects.All ); and when dropping in the other tree view the code looks like: IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter(); MemoryStream ms = (MemoryStream)e.Data.GetData( "InheritedTreeNode" ); ms.Position = 0; InheritedTreeNode data = (InheritedTreeNode)formatter.Deserialize(ms); this will throw an exception in the deserialization constructor at the first info.get