Knowledge Base Article

What is serialization/deserialization and how can I benefit from CF.Serialization on the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework?
Article ID: 1008; Product Group: Friquently Asked Questions; Modified On: 10/26/2007 12:00:00 AM

Description:
What is serialization/deserialization and how can I benefit from CF.Serialization on the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework?

Solution / Answer:

Serialization is the process of converting an object or a graph of objects into a contiguous stream of bytes.

Deserialization is the process of converting a contiguous stream of bytes back into its graph of connected objects.

The ability to convert objects to and from a byte stream is an extremely useful mechanism. For instance:

An application's state (object graph) can easily be saved in a disk file or database and then restored the next time the application is run.
A set of objects can easily be copied to the system's clipboard and then pasted into the same or another application.
A set of objects can be cloned and set aside as a backup while a user manipulates the main set of objects.
A set of objects can easily be sent over the network to a process running on another machine. The Microsoft® .NET Framework remoting and As Good As It Gets’ CF.Remoting architecture serializes and deserializes objects that are marshaled by value.

In addition to these examples, once you have serialized objects in a byte stream in memory, it is easy to perform some more useful operations on the data such as encrypting and/or compressing the data.

Since serialization is so useful, many developers have spent countless hours developing code to perform these types of actions. Historically, the serialization code is difficult to write, extremely tedious, and error prone. Some of the difficult issues that developers need to deal with are communication protocols, client/server data type mismatches, such as little/big-endian conversions, error handling, objects that refer to other objects, in and out parameters, arrays of structures.

You know that the full .NET Framework has fantastic support for serialization and deserialization. You will be happy to know that CF.Serialization libraries bring you the same support for the serialization and deserialization of the objects and object graphs on the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework. This means that all of the difficult issues mentioned before are now handled completely and transparently by the CF.Serialization. The byte-stream produced by CF.Serialization is 100% compatible with the byte-stream produced by the Microsoft’s BinaryFormatter. This means that you can serialize your object on the Compact Framework and get this object read on the full .NET framework and vise versa.

As a developer, you can work with your objects before serialization and after deserialization and have CF.Serialization handle the stuff in the middle. For almost all data types, the default behavior of provided services will be sufficient, meaning that it takes almost no work for you to make your own types serializable.

Note: serialization/deserialization of the object graphs containing IntPtr is not supported at this time due to bug in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework runtime as outlined here.