Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2010 Developer’s Handbook

Chapter 20. Serialization

In this chapter:
Introduction to Serialization Techniques
Shallow and Deep Object Cloning
Serializing Objects with Circular References
XML Serialization

As you develop applications, you will eventually need to save the objects that you use to manage data so that you can retrieve and use them later, or you’ll need to pass them to a different instance for further processing. In such cases, you basically need to create a snapshot of the current “state” of an object, saving all properties and all child objects at the same time. Of course, initially it doesn’t matter how you save data; you can read objects in byte-by-byte fashion directly from the memory or write them into a file. You could also compress the data by using ...