When working with data in a computer program, typically the data is located in the memory (RAM) of the computer on which the program is running. For example, when you are creating a letter in Microsoft Word, the contents of your letter, the formatting, and much other miscellaneous information is stored in the computer's memory. Now, imagine that you wanted to save the Word document to a file. How is this accomplished?
Clearly there needs to be some way for the data to be persisted. But the format of the data in the computer's memory may not be the ideal format to have it stored on the hard drive. Therefore there needs to be some conversion from the data's representation in memory to a representation suitable for storing it on disk. The process of converting data from one format to another is known as serialization. Once data has been serialized from one format to another, we typically will want to, at some later point in time, convert it back to the original format. This inverse operation is referred to as deserialization.
The .NET Framework provides a number of serialization options. The one that is pertinent to Web services is XML serialization, which involves serializing in-memory data to an XML format. With Web services this XML-formatted version of the data is sent from the client consuming the Web service, to the Web service, or vice-a-versa. The nice thing about the .NET Framework's XML serialization capabilities is that we, the developer, have to do very little, if anything, to benefit from it.
