C# Object Serialization: Object Graphs
The material I’ve been discussing (object serialization) implicitly describes object graphs. Once an object is serialized, the .NET Common Language Runtime automatically creates an associated object graph. Graphs are interesting entities in their own right. For more on this topic, see my article "Graph Algorithms in Java."
So, the end result of the serialization process is an object graph; this entity is written to storage during serialization. During de-serialization, the object graph is read back into memory in order to populate an appropriate target object.