Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

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
  Property Binder() As SerializationBinder
  Property Context() As StreamingContext
  Property SurrgateSelector() As ISurrogateSelector

  ' Methods
  Function Deserialize(serializationStream As Stream) As Object
  Sub Serialize(serializationStream As Stream, graph As Object)
End Interface

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 ...