Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

20.20. Customizing the Soap/Binary Serialization Process

In a majority of cases, the default serialization scheme provided by the .NET platform will be exactly what you require. Simply apply the [Serializable] attribute to your related types and pass the tree of objects to your formatter of choice for processing. In some cases, however, you might wish to become more involved with how a tree is constructed and handled during the serialization process. For example, perhaps you have a business rule that says all field data must be persisted using a particular format, or perhaps you wish to add additional bits of data to the stream that do not map directly to fields in the object being persisted (e.g., timestamps and unique identifiers).

When you ...