DTOs vs Serializing Persisted Entities

Question

I\'m curious to know what the community feels on this subject. I\'ve recently come into the question with a NHibernate/WCF scenario(entities persisted at the service layer)

Answer 1

If you're asking do I send serialized entities from a web service to the outside world? then the answer is definitely no, you're going to get minimal interoperability if you do that. DTOs help solve this problem by defining a set of 'objects' that can be instantiated in any language whether you're using C#, Java, Javascript or anything else.