Depending on what you are trying to accomplish with XML serialization, there are two different approaches currently supported by the .NET framework. While XmlSerializer focuses on mapping .NET classes to XSD datatypes and provides a lot of flexibility for customizing the serialization format (by applying System.Xml.Serialization.Xml*Attribute annotations), SoapFormatter has it's strength in general purpose serialization and deserialization. SoapFormatter embeds type information as part of the serialization format, which ensures type safety but limits interoperability. And that's why - albeit the name - XmlSerializer is applied within .NET's Webservice stack, and not SoapFormatter. SoapFormatter and BinaryFormatter are used for .NET Remoting.
Additional information on this topic is available from this TopXML article.
