I'm looking for some resources and/or examples of how to design and/or implement serialization for a .NET application, specifically an MVVM application. I've never really seen much attention given to this aspect of application design and development (that is, serializing application sessions to document files, in the way that Word or Excel or even Visual Studio do), so I'm curious if there exist any resources on that topic or if it's an area that is considered so specific to each application that there's not much that can be discussed in a general sense. Bonus points for resources dealing with serialization of UI-level information (e.g. arrangement of windows, placement of splitter controls, currently selected cell in a spreadsheet, etc).
Note that I'm not looking for things like "How to do XML Serialization in .NET"; that's more of a specific implementation detail, versus more abstract design advice.