I've created a object that is serializable and I want to serialize it to XML and then later deserialize back. What I want though is to save one property of this object as XML attribute. Here is what I mean:

[Serializable]
public class ProgramInfo
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public Version Version { get; set; }
}

public class Version
{
    public int Major { get; set; }
    public int Minor { get; set; }
    public int Build { get; set; }
}

I want to save ProgramInfo to XML file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ProgramInfo Name="MyApp" Version="1.00.0000">

</ProgramInfo>

Notice the Version property and its corresponding attribute in XML. I already have parser that turns string "1.00.0000" to valid Version object and vice-versa, but I don't know how to put it to use with this XML serialization scenario.

What you need is a property for the string representation that gets serialized:

[Serializable]
public class ProgramInfo
{
    [XmlAttribute]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    [XmlIgnore]
    public Version Version { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("Version")
    public string VersionString
    {
      get { return this.Version.ToString(); }
      set{ this.Version = Parse(value);}
    }
}