"Integration of the Standard Template Library and the Microsoft Foundation Class" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfgang Paul, Song Yang)

2.4.1 Brief description of the MFC serialization

MFC provides a method for saving and retrieving a class to/from a file. The general approach is to write/read the raw bytes to the file preceded by some type identification. This is accomplished using the class CObject as an abstract base class, the virtual function serialize, and the class CArchive. CArchive encapsulates the file and provides overloaded insertion (‹‹) and extraction (››) operators. These operators are provided for the built-in types, the standard Windows® types such as WORD, DWORD, and POINT, and pointers to CObject. The insertion operator for pointers to CObject writes type identification to the file, and then calls the serialize member function. The extraction operator verifies the type identification and then calls the serialize member function.