Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Use XML Serialization with Custom Objects

Problem

You want to use an XML document as a serialization format and load the data into an object for manipulation in your code, preferably with as little code as possible.

Solution

Use XmlSerializer to transfer data from your object to XML, and vice versa.

Discussion

The XmlSerializer class allows you to convert objects to XML data, and vice versa. This process is used natively by Web services and provides a customizable serialization mechanism that won’t require a single line of custom code. The XmlSerializer class is even intelligent enough to correctly create arrays when it finds nested elements.

The only requirements for using XmlSerializer are as follows:

• The XmlSerializer only serializes properties and ...