My client/server application is using WCF for communication, which has been great.  However one shortcoming of the current architecture is that I must use known type configuration for certain transmitted types.  I&#39;m using an in-house Pub/Sub mechanism and this requirement is unavoidable.

The problem is that it&#39;s easy to forget to add the known type, and if you do, WCF fails silently with few clues as to what&#39;s going wrong.

In my application, I know the set of types that are going to be sent.  I would like to perform the configuration programmatically, rather than declaratively through the `App.config` file which currently contains something like this:

    &lt;system.runtime.serialization&gt;
      &lt;dataContractSerializer&gt;
        &lt;declaredTypes&gt;
          &lt;add type=&quot;MyProject.MyParent, MyProjectAssembly&quot;&gt;
            &lt;knownType type=&quot;MyProject.MyChild1, MyProjectAssembly&quot;/&gt;
            &lt;knownType type=&quot;MyProject.MyChild2, MyProjectAssembly&quot;/&gt;
            &lt;knownType type=&quot;MyProject.MyChild3, MyProjectAssembly&quot;/&gt;
            &lt;knownType type=&quot;MyProject.MyChild4, MyProjectAssembly&quot;/&gt;
            &lt;knownType type=&quot;MyProject.MyChild5, MyProjectAssembly&quot;/&gt;
          &lt;/add&gt;
        &lt;/declaredTypes&gt;
      &lt;/dataContractSerializer&gt;
    &lt;/system.runtime.serialization&gt;

Instead, I&#39;d like to do something like this:

    foreach (Type type in _transmittedTypes)
    {
        // How would I write this method?
        AddKnownType(typeof(MyParent), type);
    }

Can someone please explain how I might do this?

**EDIT** Please understand that I&#39;m trying to set the known types dynamically at run time rather than declaratively in config or using attributes in the source code.

This is basically a question about the WCF API, not a style question.

**EDIT 2** [This MSDN page](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms730167.aspx) page states:

&gt; You can also add types to the ReadOnlyCollection, accessed through the KnownTypes property of the DataContractSerializer. 

Unfortunately that&#39;s all it says and it doesn&#39;t make terribly much sense given that KnownTypes is a readonly property, and the property&#39;s value is a `ReadOnlyCollection`.

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How do you configure WCF known types programmatically?