How to use System.Net with code stripping?

Questions & Answers
1

Setting Unity’s stripping level to Strip Assemblies or Strip ByteCode from Player Settings → Optimization causes (at least) some of the System.Net functionality fail.

To test the issue, I created a simple project that only tries to use System.Net.WebRequest.Create():

using UnityEngine;
using System.Net;

public class NetworkAccessTest : MonoBehaviour
{
	void Start()
	{
		bool succeeded = false;
		try
		{
			WebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com"); 
			succeeded = true;
		}
		catch (System.Exception e)
		{
			Debug.Log(string.Format("Exception: {0}", e));
			succeeded = false;
		}
		Debug.Log(string.Format("Web request creation succeeded: {0}", succeeded));
	}
}

It works fine without stripping. But without sripping:


Exception: System.NotSupportedException: http://www.google.com/
  at System.Net.WebRequest.GetCreator (System.String prefix) [0x00000] in :0 
  at System.Net.WebRequest.Create (System.Uri requestUri) [0x00000] in :0 
  at System.Net.WebRequest.Create (System.String requestUriString) [0x00000] in :0 
  at NetworkAccessTest.Start () [0x00000] in :0

The questions:

  1. Is it possible to use WebRequest and other networking classes from System.Net with code stripping?
  2. And if it’s possible, how?

It’s possible to list types that shouldn’t be stripped: docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/iphone-playerSizeOptimization.html. Would that solve the issue? How would I conveniently find out which types to list there? I can only think of reading the Mono source code and trying to deduce the missing types that could cause the expections.

2

Adding the following link.xml to Assets direcotry solves my little test case:

<linker>
	<assembly fullname="System">
		<type fullname="System.Net.HttpRequestCreator" preserve="all"/>		
	</assembly>
</linker>

I found the needed type by reading Mono sources for System.Net. Finding all necessary types for a large application is a pain in a neck, though, so any ideas on making that easier would be still appreciated.