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

Have a schema version number in the serialized object. Using custom deserialization, check the version attribute first, and if it turns out to be an old version, upgrade it to the latest schema before deserializing.