Best practice to serialize and deserialize .net objects across versions

Question

Objects are serialized to a database using the .NET XML serializer. The object can change over time, and therefore multiple versions exist in the database at one time.

A

Answer 1

Don't remove/rename properties. Only add them.

Assign default values to all properties.

This will guarantee that xml serializer will be able to deserialize old xml into new object, and that object will have "sane" values.