Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Appendix C. Serialization Basics

The .NET framework is a many-splendored thing. Parts of this book have explored sections of the framework that are completely outside the System.Windows.Forms namespace because you need that knowledge to build real WinForms applications. A similar topic is serialization. The need for serialization can be found in any number of places, but for applications developers, serialization is used to save and restore settings data and document data. It's in that narrow view that we explore this topic.