What is serialization in .NET and what are the ways to control serialization?
Serialization is the process of converting an object into a stream of bytes. On the other hand Deserialization is the process of creating an object from a stream of bytes. Serialization/Deserialization is used to transport or to persist objects.
Serialization can be defined as the process of storing the state of an object to a storage medium. During this process, the public and private fields of the object and the name of the class, including the assembly are converted to a stream of bytes.
Which is then written to a data stream. Upon the object's subsequent deserialized, an exact clone of the original object is created.
Binary serialization preserves Type fidelity, which is useful for preserving the state of an object between different invocations of an application. For example: An object can be shared between different applications by serializing it to the clipboard.
You can serialize an object to a stream, disk, memory, over a network, and so forth. Remoting uses serialization to pass objects "By Value" from one computer or application domain to another. XML serialization serializes only public properties and fields and does not preserve Type fidelity. This is useful when you want to provide or consume data without restricting the application that uses the data.
As XML is an open standard, it is an attractive choice for sharing data across the Web. SOAP is also an open standard, which makes it an attractive choice too. There are two separate mechanisms provided by the .NET class library -
XmlSerializer and
SoapFormatter/BinaryFormatter. Microsoft uses
XmlSerializer for Web Services, and uses
SoapFormatter/BinaryFormatter for remoting. Both are available for use in your own code.
Written by Sandeep Mogulla, Webmaster at
www.startvbdotnet.com
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