What's a simple/lightweight way to persist objects in .net during development and experimentation?

Question

I'm looking for a simple way to persist objects when experimenting and creating mock UIs or services. I already know what ORM I'll ultimately use later on when producing a releasable product but I don't want to bother setting it all up at this stage.

I'm looking for something that:

• has low install requirements (ideally, single dll)
• has low setup requirements (no column definitions, no XML mappings, no table creation..)
• has low performance (really just needs to support 1 or 2 concurrent users)
• persists data across application restarts

What I really want, is something like a hashtable that survives application restarts.

What tools would you see appropriate for this? What approaches do you take when you want to persist simple data structures without any muss?

Answer 1

You could just use the framework's built-in Serialization Support.

In terms of your requirements:

• No install requirements (in framework already)
• No setup requirements (provided types are serializable)
• Performance is not as good as most ORMs, but still works.
• Can persist data to files, or any other source that can take a Stream

Answer 2

well will tricky to tick all these boxes.

I have used SQLite in the past, was quite to mock DBs.

As it comes to persistance, you can try to use native Xml Serialization/JSON or Google's ProtoBuffers.

It is better if you have your Domain Model for your data, that way you can easily Desereliaze/Restore from underlying data (be in simple dump file/xml/db).

that way you will alwyas work with Domain Model and not the underlying data. you can change your underlaying data later on but your Domain Model stays the same