Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Serialization in the ADO.NET Entity Framework

When you create Entity Data Models, entities are automatically decorated with Serializable and DataContract attributes and their members as DataMember as you can easily check by investigating the code-behind file for EDMs. This enables binary and Xml serialization for entities also in WCF scenarios. To understand how this works, create a new console project and add a new EDM wrapping the Northwind database (see Chapter 27, “Introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework,” for a review), including only the Customers and Orders tables. Basically you use formatters as you did in the objects serialization with no differences. Code in Listing 43.5 shows how to accomplish this.

Listing 43.5 Serializing Entities ...