WCF “k__BackingField” Property Naming

While I was working on a project that involved designing WCF services as Backend layer, I ended up defining a class

[Serializable]
public class ProgramDetails
{
    public string ProgramName { get; set; }
}

When this WCF service is exposed, there is a little different behavior in the naming of this Class and its Members.

When serializing these objects, the serializer will look at all FIELDS of the class no matter their scope:  public, private, etc.  This is because it uses System.Runtime.Serialization, not System.Xml.Serialization.

What happens as a result is - suffix k__BackingField added to each property. That is ProgramName becomes ProgramNamek__BackingField.  This is really annoying to see such cryptic thing. So how do we resolve it?

Its simple!  Modify your code to-

[DataContract]
public class ProgramDetails
{
        [DataMember]
        public string ProgramName { get; set; }
}

System.Runtime.Serialization, the serializer will interpret your DataMembers as fields on the class and use your naming.  So what you see is ProgramName and not ProgramNamek__BackingField