Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Unleashed

Object Persistence

Object persistence is the ability to persist an object's state to some sort of storage medium. This enables an object to save itself in a particular format, to be either persisted or transported and restored at a convenient point in time.

The .NET Framework enables you to persist objects to disk, memory, or other storage mediums through serialization. It also provides you with some default serializers to accomplish this task. The .NET Framework provides two basic forms of serialization: binary and XML. Although there are more differences, as described in Table 7.2, the basic difference is that XML is a readable and open standard, whereas binary is not.

Table 7.2. Binary and XML Serialization

Serialization Form	Description
Binary ...