XML Serialization

Abstract

Your .NET applications consist of one or more classes. The objects of these classes are used to store state information. As long as your objects are available in the memory of your application, this state information is readily available. But what if you would like to persist object state across application shutdowns? At first you may think of saving object state in a database. However, databases generally store information in relational format, whereas objects often have a hierarchical structure. Moreover, you would need to create many tables in the database on your own. Storing object data in a database comes with its own overheads. Wouldn't it be nice if the entire object state could be stored to a medium and retrieved later? That is what serialization offers.