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 choose, but the two most common ones are eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Tip

JSON is more compact and is best for web and mobile applications. XML is more verbose, but is better supported on older systems.

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

Serializing with XML

Add a new console application project named Ch10_Serialization.

Note

If you are targeting the .NET Core, then you would need to manually add the latest version of the System.Xml.XmlSerializer NuGet package.

To show a common example, we will define a custom class to store information about a person and then create an object graph using a list of Person instances with nesting.

Add a class...