Question

I’m building a WPF app that contains a form with “standard” inputs (controls like TextBoxes, RadioButtons,etc). If I need to store the form’s data locally, what do you think is the most straightforward way to do it ?

Plain text with StreamWriter

xml with xmlserializer

xml / Linq

database / Linq (it would require to install sql server in the box it will run in, is it worth the trouble?)

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would say XML-serialization is most straightforward, it requires no additional database and your average CLR-objects can be serialized right away. I use it for settings files and other stuff but would not recommend it for huge datasets because of all the overhead (cannot really tell you what qualifies as too large, it also depends on how often you need to store/retrieve the data).