Question

How can I return a new empty type of T if an exception occurs with-in the function body?

What would be the best way to x to a new T() in case there is a problem while Deserializing the xml?

Check out how I’ve got the catch block, and how would I handle this?

        public static T DeserializeXml<T>(this string xml) where T : class
    {

        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
        StreamReader sr = null;
        T x = null;
        //
        try
        {
            doc.LoadXml(xml); doc.Save(ms);
            ms.Position = 0;
            sr = new StreamReader(ms);
            XmlSerializer i = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            x = (T)i.Deserialize(sr);
        }
        catch (Exception) {
            x = null;
        }
        finally {
        sr.Close(); sr.Dispose(); ms.Close(); ms.Dispose();
        }
        //
        return x as T;
    }

Answer 1

You could either return default(T), or add a constraint to the generic type where T : new(), in which case you could return new T().

Basically, default(T) is for cases where you don’t know if T is a value or reference type. It returns different things for different types — null for classes, zero for numeric types, and empty instances of structs. There’s a good article on MSDN.