Question

I just wrote this SerializationHelper class, but I can’t believe this is necessary!

using System.IO;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

public static class SerializationHelper
{
    public static string Serialize<T>(T obj)
    {
        var outStream = new StringWriter();
        var ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        ser.Serialize(outStream, obj);
        return outStream.ToString();
    }

    public static T Deserialize<T>(string serialized)
    {
        var inStream = new StringReader(serialized);
        var ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        return (T)ser.Deserialize(inStream);
    }
}

And it’s used like this:

var serialized = SerializationHelper.Serialize(myObj);

and:

var myObj = SerializationHelper.Deserialize<MyType>(serialized)

Am I missing something in the .NET framework? This is not rocket science!

Answer 1

It’s useful if you are doing any real amount (>1) of serialization/deserialization within a project. This was the case for me one time, so I just put a similar class in a Utils library, along with other reusable functions.