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?