I have to serialize several objects inheriting from WebControl for database storage. These include several unecessary (to me) properties that I would prefer to omit from serialization. For example BackColor, BorderColor, etc.

Here is an example of an XML serialization of one of my controls inheriting from WebControl.

<Control xsi:type="SerializePanel">
        <ID>grCont</ID>
        <Controls />
        <BackColor />
        <BorderColor />
        <BorderWidth />
        <CssClass>grActVid bwText</CssClass>
        <ForeColor />
        <Height />
        <Width />
        ...
      </Control>

I have been trying to create a common base class for my controls that inherits from WebControl and uses the "xxxSpecified" trick to selectively choose not to serialize certain properties.

For example to ignore an empty BorderColor property, I'd expect

[XmlIgnore]    
public bool BorderColorSpecified()
{
    return !base.BorderColor.IsEmpty;
}

to work, but it's never called during serialization.

I've also tried it in the class to be serialized as well as the base class.

Since the classes themselves might change, I'd prefer not to have to create a custom serializer. Any ideas?