Windows Forms Programming in C#

Formatters

A formatter is an object that knows how to write arbitrary objects to a stream. A formatter exposes this functionality by implementing the IFormatter information from the System.Runtime.Serialization namespace:

interface IFormatter {
  // Properties
  SerializationBinder Binder { get; set; }
  StreamingContext Context { get; set; }
  ISurrogateSelector SurrogateSelector { get; set; }

  // Methods
  object Deserialize(Stream serializationStream);
					void Serialize(Stream serializationStream, object graph);
}

A formatter has two jobs. The first is to serialize arbitrary objects, specifically their fields, including nested objects.^[1] The formatter knows which fields to serialize using Reflection,^[2] which is the .NET API for finding out type information ...