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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T18:57:28+00:00

I need to store basic objects (with a maximum of 5 properites in each

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I need to store basic objects (with a maximum of 5 properites in each object) when my application is closed or deactivated. Now I understand the event handlers we have available to us but I’m not so sure about how to go about saving the objects so that they can be called later.

My original thought was to store the objects to an xml file in isolated storage and just simply read the xml file when the app was open again and reload all objects as needed. But I keep hearing about serialization when it comes to tombstoning.

Now this raises some questions:

1.) Is serialization better to use than saving to an xml file in this scenario?

2.) What are the differences between doing one over the other if both store data to be called at a later time?

3.) Why is serialization even an option? Is it because its faster or uses less resources?

4.) If serialization is the way to go in this situation, what resources are available to get started?

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sorry I do not have enough points to comment. However Serialization is the general term for converting an object into a format that can be persisted away from you application. Or in some cases used in the application. You can serialize in different formats and the dotNET framework provides for binary serialization where the objects gets converted into a byte array or XML serialization where it gets converted into XML.

    You don’t say whether you are trying to persist a small number of objects (for example application configuration data) or a large collection of objects with a few properties each.

    If it is a simple object and the size of the collection is relatively small then I would think using the built in serialization classes would work fine.

    Serializing complex objects using the built in classes can be slow because reflection is used to find out what is in the objects. If performance is an issue then there are faster serializers out there (check out Code Project) or you can write your own that specifically knows about the objects you want to serialize and therfore does not have the reflection overhead

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