Introduction

In the past, maintaining the state of an object in ASP often required some very inventive and painstaking code. In the brave new world of .NET, however, Object Serialization offers us a comparatively easy way to do just that, as well as some other useful tasks.

As a kid, I remember waking up on many a cold morning and stumbling into the kitchen with my eyes half-closed, looking forward to whatever Mom had prepared for breakfast, only to find an anticlimactic bowl of steaming hot just-add-boiling-water instant oatmeal waiting for me on the table. At least I wasn't like the more unfortunate kids whose mothers force-fed them that white silt of death, powdered milk. I am absolutely certain that something must go seriously awry in the dehydration process of milk because upon rehydration, that stuff is just plain nasty.

Be that as it may, I think that at least one of the developers involved in creating the .NET Framework must have been one of those abused children. I see powdered milk fingerprints all over some of the new data management techniques in .NET. Then again, in an age of dehydrated/rehydrated food products, what could be more logical than dehydrated/rehydrated data?