Quote Originally Posted by bgmacaw
It's hard to know what MS will do in future releases of VB or .NET. I doubt that they would break binary serialization but you never know for sure what they'll do.
True, but also consider that I intend to be able to save data for older versions of the program as well. The best analogy in this case would be to equate this project with Adobe Photoshop and the data as a PSD file. Photoshop can save data for older versions of Photoshop.

Quote Originally Posted by bgmacaw
Should this happen you may have to write a seperate converter app to move it to the new format. This might be a little bit of pain if this comes up but if you have a good design it shouldn't be that daunting.
If the serialization is done using the built-in serialization formatters, then the utility will only be able to use one serialization format or the other (i.e. v1.0 or v2.0) but not both (afaik).

The conversion tool will still have to implement one of the formatters from scratch.

Quote Originally Posted by bgmacaw
Right now, I wouldn't worry about it too much though.
Well, since I'm still in the design phase, I'd like to worry about it as I'll also be maintaining this beast myself. If I write it now and it turns out to have been a bad idea (i.e. I should have implemented my own formatter or something) then I'll be screwed into rewriting a large portion of code as well as probably having to reverse-engineer three or four binary formats. Ack... reverse-engineering...

Thanks for your help, though.

To clarify, does anybody know of an open-source binary formatter or has anybody written one that's not based on any 'little-black-box' formatters (like the kind included with .Net)