.NET Skills is an AI coding plugin that provides skills and specialized guidance for professional .NET development, covering areas such as C#, Akka.NET, Aspire, Entity Framework Core, testing, and performance. .NET developers use it with coding assistants to apply production-oriented patterns while building and maintaining applications. The catalogue contains the plugin’s skills, agents, and instructions.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add Aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills --skill serializationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aaronontheweb/dotnet-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills/serialization)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills/serialization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills/serialization/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills/serialization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills/serialization.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00044 | $0.02558 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.01023 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00512 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00256 |
Grade A, and why
serialization scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 18d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
Copies of this mod
2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- serialization — 100% identical, 3 lines differ
- dotnet-techne-serialisation — 91% identical, 48 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 414 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Serialization in .NET
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when:
- Choosing a serialization format for APIs, messaging, or persistence
- Migrating from Newtonsoft.Json to System.Text.Json
- Implementing AOT-compatible serialization
- Designing wire formats for distributed systems
- Optimizing serialization performance
Schema-Based vs Reflection-Based
| Aspect | Schema-Based | Reflection-Based |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | Protobuf, MessagePack, System.Text.Json (source gen) | Newtonsoft.Json, BinaryFormatter |
| Type info in payload | No (external schema) | Yes (type names embedded) |
| Versioning | Explicit field numbers/names | Implicit (type structure) |
| Performance | Fast (no reflection) | Slower (runtime reflection) |
| AOT compatible | Yes | No |
| Wire compatibility | Excellent | Poor |
Recommendation: Use schema-based serialization for anything that crosses process boundaries.
Format Recommendations
| Use Case | Recommended Format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| REST APIs | System.Text.Json (source gen) | Standard, AOT-compatible |
| gRPC | Protocol Buffers | Native format, excellent versioning |
| Actor messaging | MessagePack or Protobuf | Compact, fast, version-safe |
| Event sourcing | Protobuf or MessagePack | Must handle old events forever |
| Caching | MessagePack | Compact, fast |
| Configuration | JSON (System.Text.Json) | Human-readable |
| Logging | JSON (System.Text.Json) | Structured, parseable |
Formats to Avoid
| Format | Problem |
|---|---|
| BinaryFormatter | Security vulnerabilities, deprecated, never use |
| Newtonsoft.Json default | Type names in payload break on rename |
| DataContractSerializer | Complex, poor versioning |
| XML | Verbose, slow, complex |
System.Text.Json with Source Generators
For JSON serialization, use System.Text.Json with source generators for AOT compatibility and performance.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 18d ago Changed 9ab830f2c21a
- 1mo ago First seen · 414 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 0f1f25452107
serialization is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aaronontheweb/dotnet-skills (1,241 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 2,558 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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