Book Image

C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fifth Edition

By : Mark J. Price
Book Image

C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fifth Edition

By: Mark J. Price

Overview of this book

In C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development, Fifth Edition, expert teacher Mark J. Price gives you everything you need to start programming C# applications. This latest edition uses the popular Visual Studio Code editor to work across all major operating systems. It is fully updated and expanded with a new chapter on the Microsoft Blazor framework. The book’s first part teaches the fundamentals of C#, including object-oriented programming and new C# 9 features such as top-level programs, target-typed new object instantiation, and immutable types using the record keyword. Part 2 covers the .NET APIs, for performing tasks like managing and querying data, monitoring and improving performance, and working with the file system, async streams, serialization, and encryption. Part 3 provides examples of cross-platform apps you can build and deploy, such as websites and services using ASP.NET Core or mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. The best type of application for learning the C# language constructs and many of the .NET libraries is one that does not distract with unnecessary application code. For that reason, the C# and .NET topics covered in Chapters 1 to 13 feature console applications. In Chapters 14 to 20, having mastered the basics of the language and libraries, you will build practical applications using ASP.NET Core, Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Blazor. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the understanding and skills you need to use C# 9 and .NET 5 to create websites, services, and mobile apps.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
22
Index

Serializing object graphs

Serialization is the process of converting a live object into a sequence of bytes using a specified format. Deserialization is the reverse process.

There are dozens of formats you can specify, but the two most common ones are eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Good Practice: JSON is more compact and is best for web and mobile applications. XML is more verbose but is better supported in more legacy systems. Use JSON to minimize the size of serialized object graphs. JSON is also a good choice when sending object graphs to web applications and mobile applications because JSON is the native serialization format for JavaScript and mobile apps often make calls over limited bandwidth, so the number of bytes is important.

.NET has multiple classes that will serialize to and from XML and JSON. We will start by looking at XmlSerializer and JsonSerializer.

Serializing as XML

Let's start by looking...