C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 38. System.Runtime.Serialization

The act of serialization transforms an object (and all of its associated objects and/or data elements) into a stream of bytes, suitable for storage or transmission across a network. The reverse of this act, called deserialization, is to take the same stream of bytes and reconstitute the objects exactly as they were at the time of serialization.

This act, which sounds simple in theory, encompasses a number of points that must be addressed. For starters, the serialization libraries must provide complete reference semantics—that is, if an object holds two references to other objects, both of which happen to point to the same object, then the serialization mechanism needs to keep that in place. Therefore, when the stream is deserialized, both references point to the same object again.

In addition, the actual format of the stream of bytes may be different from application to application. For example, for storage into a binary column in a database, the serialized representation must be as compact and succinct as possible—no “wasted” bytes. But if we want to send the serialized data over an HTTP link to a non-.NET process, then a binary format is entirely inappropriate, and an XML-based one is more useful.

The System.Runtime.Serialization namespace and its child namespace, System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters (with its own two child namespaces, System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary and System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap), directly ...