Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

18.8. Serialization

Section 18.5 demonstrated how to write the individual fields of a Record object to a text file, and Section 18.6 demonstrated how to read those fields from a file and place their values in a Record object in memory. In the examples, Record was used to aggregate the information for one record. When the instance variables for a Record were output to a disk file, certain information was lost, such as the type of each value. For instance, if the value "3" is read from a file, there is no way to tell whether the value came from an Integer, a String or a Decimal. We have only data, not type information, on disk. If the program that is going to read this data “knows” what object type the data corresponds to, then the data can be ...