Practice and explore

Test your knowledge and understanding by answering some questions, get some hands-on practice, and explore this chapter's topics with deeper research.

Exercise 10.1 - test your knowledge

Answer the following questions:

1. What is the difference between using the File class and the FileInfo class?

2. What is the difference between the ReadByte method and the Read method of a stream?

3. When would you use the StringReader, TextReader, and StreamReader classes?

4. What does the DeflateStream type do?

5. How many bytes per character does the UTF-8 encoding use?

6. What is an object graph?

7. What is the best serialization format to choose for minimizing space requirements?

8. What is the best serialization format to choose for cross-platform compatibility?

Exercise 10.2 - practice serializing as XML

Create a console application named Ch10_Exercise02 that creates a list of shapes, uses serialization to save it to the filesystem using XML, and then deserializes it back:

    // create a list of Shapes to serialize...