Converted a big VB6 application and turned collections into dictionaries. Lot of work.

Want some state persistenceof the main object tree in legible files - preferably without rewriting all my classes or writing my own serializers

Find dictionariesare intogenerics and thus not supported for SOAP, which itself is a dead end (and not even there in .NET 3.5)

Hopelessly lost in all kinds of old threads, old examples, about this issue. Some threads end with recommending NXMLSerializer, but my company's firewall won't let it through - and I would prefer a less complicated and more standard solution anyway.
If XML is as important as it is trumpeted, they must have a way to serialize the usual stuff, right ? What is it ?