Serializing object graphs

Serialization is the process of converting a live object into a sequence of bytes using a specified format. Deserialization is the reverse process.

There are dozens of formats you can specify, but the two most common ones are eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Good Practice: JSON is more compact and is best for web and mobile applications. XML is more verbose but is better supported in more legacy systems. Use JSON to minimize the size of serialized object graphs. JSON is also a good choice when sending object graphs to web applications and mobile applications because JSON is the native serialization format for JavaScript and mobile apps often make calls over limited bandwidth, so the number of bytes is important.

.NET has multiple classes that will serialize to and from XML and JSON. We will start by looking at XmlSerializer and JsonSerializer.

Serializing as XML

Let's start by looking...