Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Serialize an Object to Disk

Problem

You need to persist a serializable object to a file and recreate it later.

Solution

Use .NET serialization with the help of BinaryFormatter or SoapFormatter.

Discussion

All serializable objects can be converted into a stream of bytes, and vice versa. To serialize an object manually, you need to use a class that supports IFormatter. The .NET Framework includes two: BinaryFormatter, which serializes an object to a compact binary representation, and SoapFormatter, which uses the SOAP XML format, and results in a longer text-based message. The BinaryFormatter class is found in the System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary namespace, while SoapFormatter is found in the System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap ...