Chapter 11. Serialization

The .NET Framework includes extensive support for serialization and deserialization, allowing clients to explicitly and implicitly serialize object instances and arbitrarily complex object graphs, and allowing types a wide degree of control over how and where they are serialized and deserialized.

This chapter introduces the support for object serialization and deserialization that is built into the .NET Framework, and shows how clients and objects can participate in the serialization and deserialization process. Unless otherwise stated, the types mentioned in this chapter all exist in the System or System.Runtime.Serialization namespaces.