Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Binary Serialization

The following example shows how you can serialize a typed collection of strings into a file on disk using the BinaryFormatter class:

Note

The above code example requires Imports System.IO and Imports System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary directives.

The code simply creates a new file named SerializedData.Dat and puts the result of the binary serialization in the file. If you examine the content of the file with the Windows Notepad, you can obtain a result similar to what is shown in Figure 43.1.

Figure 43.1 Examining the result of the serialization process.

You don’t effectively need to know how your objects are ...