Mastering Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 16. Serialization and XML

You have seen how the various collections store items, how to access their elements, and even how to sort and search the collections. To make the most of collections and to use them to store large sets of data, you should also learn how to persist collections to disk files.

Persisting data means to store them on disk at the end of one session and reload them into the same application in a later session. The file with the persisted data can also be shared among different applications and even different computers, as long as there's an application that knows what to do with the data. What good is it to create a large collection if your application can't save it and retrieve it from a disk file in another session? ...