C# interview question :- What is Serialization in .NET ?

Serialization is a process by which we can save the state of the object by converting the object in to stream of bytes.These bytes can then be stored in database, files, memory etc.

Below is a simple code of serializing the object.

MyObject objObject = new MyObject();

objObject.Value = 100;              
// Serialization using SoapFormatter

SoapFormatter formatter = new SoapFormatter();

Stream objFileStream = new FileStream("c:\\MyFile.xml", FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None);

formatter.Serialize(objFileStream, objObject);

objFileStream.Close();

 Below is simple code which shows how to deserialize an object.

//De-Serialization

Stream objNewFileStream = new FileStream("c:\\MyFile.xml", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read);

MyObject objObject =(MyObject)formatter.Deserialize(objNewFileStream);

objNewFileStream.Close();