Hour 24. Serialization

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Have you ever worked with an application and changed some of the user interface elements in a manner that more suited your working style? Have you ever worked with an application that allowed this but failed to save the state the application was in when you last used it so that you had to change these elements each time you launched the application? If so, this is a type of application that could take advantage of serialization but is not doing so.

Serialization is the process of packaging the current state of an object into a form that can easily be saved to a storage device or transported across process or machine boundaries. Rather than you manually entering entries into a file or the Registry, serialization allows you to send a stream of data from one object to another object or device, such as a hard disk, where it can either be constructed into an exact copy of that object or later retrieved to reconstruct the object.

In this hour you will learn:

• The two types of serialization supported by the .NET Framework and the differences between them

• How to construct a .NET object that supports serialization

• How to create a managed C++ application with a Windows Form that uses a serialized object to maintain state information

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