what does serialize mean

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rachel Suddeth
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Rachel Suddeth

? I have seen apparently different meanings... If you say "designer
serialization", it seems to mean that a setting is put into
"InitializeComponent" by the designer. Then remoting stuff talks about
serialization that has a different meaning that I can't seem to understand.
None of the articles I've looked at explain what it means -- they seem to
feel it's something standard. I've done network programming, but not with
Windows (or even PC's, really) so maybe I've missed because of that.

Anyway, I think there must be something the two meanings have in common?

Thanks,
Rachel
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For me, when I say "serialize" I mean to convert an object into a different
format for easy storage or transmission.

For example, say you have an Employee object with properties like Name, Age,
Salary, etc. You programmatically create an instance of that object and set
its values. Now, what if you wanted to store that object on your hard drive
when the user closes your application?

To do that, you would have to write some code to write the values to a text
file, XML file, database, something. That processing of converting your
object to a file or whatever would be "serializing" your object.

When someone starts your application up again, you might need a way to load
that object back up from the XML file, etc. The process of getting the
information from the file, creating a new Employe object, setting the
values, etc. would be "deserializing" it.

Others here may have a better way of explaining it. :)
 
This makes sense. It does a reasonable job of tying the meanings (storage,
transmission) together. And thinking about writing object information to a
file does put me in mind of a tie in with the ordinary English meaning of
serial (something like arranged in a sequence.) Object information is
conceptually arranged in space, but traditional C I/O was done in streams
(sequence of bytes.) I think I will remember now :-)
 
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