POCO = Plain Old CLR (or better: Class) Object
DTO = Data Transfer Object
In this post there is a difference, but frankly most of the blogs I read describe P
DTO classes are used to serialize/deserialize data from different sources. When you want to deserialize a object from a source, does not matter what external source it is: service, file, database etc. you may be only want to use some part of that but you want an easy way to deserialize that data to an object. after that you copy that data to the XModel you want to use. A serializer is a beautiful technology to load DTO objects. Why? you only need one function to load (deserialize) the object.