Discussion on:

Application development: An introduction to serialization in .NET

I think this article is a good starting point for beginners to understand how and when to use serialization. I would think, however, that it might also prove to be helpful if you cover why you would use serialization. Just a suggestion...

I think it is important to point out that you do not have to have the serialization attribute in order to serialize a class using Xml Serialization (at least in VB.Net you don't).

While it is good practice to do so and helps if you ever have to leave code for another developer, you can short circuit the serialization simply by calling the Serialize or Deserialize methods in the XmlSerializer object.

This is a nice article. I always wanted to learn about serialization. It would be great If someone could post a couple of sample scenarios.

Thanks.. It helps..

Could we also have some information to
describe the serialization of objects that
inherits abstract classes and those which
have private fields..

When do we say that a class is Serializable?

Thanks
-PS2