.NET - Serialization to XML and back - Saving/reading custom configuration files

XML serialization in the .net framework is a powerful and very useful technology, yet I wasn't too familiar with it, so I felt I should blog about it. One of the situation where I think it is very appropriate to use this is to create custom configurations and read/save/modify them for web (server) or desktop applications. Using the asp.net Cache class it is also possible to assign the serialized file as a cache dependency thereby re-read and re-hydrate the serialized object from the xml file. This is a perfect scenario for xml configuration files. The below links are references and the code is from "switch on the code c# xml serialization tutorial", link shown below.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1186743/replacement-for-xml-serialization
• http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/javatutorial.html
• [Great] http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/csharp-tutorial-xml-serialization
• http://www.developer.com/net/csharp/article.php/3110371/SerializationDeserialization-in-NET.htm
• [Great] http://www.dotnetjohn.com/articles.aspx?articleid=173
  

STEP 1: Create a simple .net class (Plain old .NET object, PONO), for example:

public class Movie
{
  public string Name
  { get; set; }

  public int Rating
  { get; set; }

  public DateTime ReleaseDate
  { get; set; }
}

STEP 2: Serialize it to Xml using the XmlSerializer class:

static public void SerializeToXML(Movie movie)
{
  XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Movie));
  TextWriter textWriter = new StreamWriter(@"C:\movie.xml");
  serializer.Serialize(textWriter, movie);
  textWriter.Close();
}

It would produce an XML file, named movie.xml, as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Movie xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Title>Starship Troopers</Title>
  <Rating>6.9</Rating>
  <ReleaseDate>1997-11-07T00:00:00</ReleaseDate>
</Movie>

STEP 3: Modify the Xml file and deserialize (update and re-hydrate) the .net object from the xml file:

static Movie DeserializeFromXML()
{
   XmlSerializer deserializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Movie));
   TextReader textReader = new StreamReader(@"C:\movie.xml");
   Movie movie = (Movie)deserializer.Deserialize(textReader);
   textReader.Close();

   return movie;
}