Should I serialize .net objects to *file* using SOAPFormatter or XMLFormatter if the files are going to later be used by Unix+PC

I have a desktop app that saves out user data (mostly arrays of numbers) to a file by Serializing an object. This file will later be used to reload user data by Deserialising it.

I would also like these files to be user-readable and in some standard structured format. The files will be manually moved around (not tr开发者_JAVA百科ansmitted) and will be read by users on both PCs and Unix machines . Just to clarify - my desktop app will not run in Unix but I'd like the Unix users to be able to write a script to parse the data if they needed.

Is there a good reason to use the Soap formatter rather than XML formatter to do this?

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Follow the rule you were taut in Grad schools. When it comes to Platform Independence go with XML

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Do not use SOAP Formatter. The XML generated is quite bizarre and pretty unusable - I personally believe it is just a binary serialization but in SOAP.

Use XmlSerializer instead.