Best way to store data locally in .NET (C#)

Question

I\'m writing an application that takes user data and stores it locally for use later. The application will be started and stopped fairly often, and I\'d like to make it save

Answer 1

The first thing I'd look at is a database. However, serialization is an option. If you go for binary serialization, then I would avoid BinaryFormatter - it has a tendency to get angry between versions if you change fields etc. Xml via XmlSerialzier would be fine, and can be side-by-side compatible (i.e. with the same class definitions) with protobuf-net if you want to try contract-based binary serialization (giving you a flat file serializer without any effort).