Question

This must be very simple but I can’t find it by searching.

I have the following code to serialize an object to a file and back. But now I want to serialize to a byte[] and back.

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Class1));
using (TextWriter textWriter = new StreamWriter(path))
    serializer.Serialize(textWriter, class1);
using (TextReader textReader = new StreamReader(path))
    class1b = (Class1)serializer.Deserialize(textReader);

I tried using a MemoryStream:

byte[] buffer = new byte[1000];
using (TextWriter textWriter = new MemoryStream(buffer))
...

but I get an error. So how should I do it?

Answer 1

You should send the stream to the StreamWriter instead of trying to assign the Stream to a TextWriter.

using (var stream = new MemoryStream(buffer))
{
    using (TextWriter textWriter = new StreamWriter(stream))
    { ... }
}