.NET Overview

The Magic of Metadata

To solve all these problems .NET must provide an underlying set of services that is available to all languages at all times. It also has to understand enough about an application to be able to provide these services.

Serialization provides a simple example. Every programmer at some time or another has to write code to save data. Why should every programmer have to reinvent the wheel of how to persist nested objects and complicated data structures? Why should every programmer have to figure out how to do this for a variety of data stores? .NET can do this for the programmer. Programmers can also decide to do it themselves if required.

To see how this is done, look at the Serialize sample associated with this ...

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