 <p>Possibly not the most relevant answer to your original question but since I got redirected to this page while looking for a way to control the formatting of DateTime properties in the serialisation someone else might find it useful.</p> <p>I found that by adding the following to your app.config/web.config instructs the .NET serialisation to format DateTime properties consistently:</p> <pre><code> &lt;system.xml.serialization&gt; &lt;dateTimeSerialization mode="Local" /&gt; &lt;/system.xml.serialization&gt; </code></pre> <p>Ref: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229751(v=VS.85).aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229751(v=VS.85).aspx</a></p>