Serialization is a powerful tool and a major factor in many intermediate development technologies such as webservices.

Simply call “SerializeObject” and pass in the class name of your object for the “T” parameters, and your object will be serialized as an xml string which can then be stored in DB or written to disk!

To mark a public variable so it is not serialized, such as a decrypted key value or password, simply mark it with the attribute [XmlIgnore].

Enjoy. 😉

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace ApplicationName
{

    /// <summary>
    /// Contains generic static/shared methods accessible throughout the site
    /// </summary>
    public static class XMLSerialization
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Serialize Object of Type T to XML and return value as string.
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
        /// <param name="pObject"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static String SerializeObject<T>(T pObject)
        {
            /*try
            */
            String XmlizedString = null;
            MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, pObject);
            memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;
            XmlizedString = UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray());
            return XmlizedString;
            /*}
            catch (Exception e) { System.Console.WriteLine(e); return null; }*/
        }

        public static T DeserializeObject<T>(string URL)
        {
            /*try
            */
            T returnObject;
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            XmlTextReader xmlTextReader = new XmlTextReader(URL);
            returnObject = (T)xs.Deserialize(xmlTextReader);
            //xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, pObject);
            return returnObject;
            /*}
            catch (Exception e) { System.Console.WriteLine(e); return null; }*/
        }

        public static String UTF8ByteArrayToString(Byte[] characters)
        {

            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            String constructedString = encoding.GetString(characters);
            return (constructedString);
        }

        public static Byte[] StringToUTF8ByteArray(String pXmlString)
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            Byte[] byteArray = encoding.GetBytes(pXmlString);
            return byteArray;
        }
    }
}

Note:
Any snippets may have been condensed from their original sources for brevity. See references for original articles.

All server side code examples are in C# .Net.

References
Original reference misplaced.