Serialize and Deserialize objects in .NET

I'm not sure why XML standard doesn't allow certain characters to be encoded into XML... and it causes problems.

This C# code:

            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(StringToUTF8ByteArray(objString)))
            {
                obj = xs.Deserialize(memoryStream);
            }

crashes with exception:

System.InvalidOperationException: There is an error in XML document (1, 50). ---> System.Xml.XmlException: '', hexadecimal value 0x0C, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 50.

Here's the fix and the fully working version (note that XmlTextReader is used in between MemoryStream and XmlSerializer:

        [TestMethod()]
        public void SerializeDeserializeObjectTest()
        {
            SerializeDeserializeObjectTest("test");
            SerializeDeserializeObjectTest("\f");
        }

        private void SerializeDeserializeObjectTest(string input)
        {
            string serialized = Serializer.SerializeObject(input);
            string deserialized = Serializer.DeserializeObject<string>(serialized);
            Assert.AreEqual(input, deserialized, input);
        }


    public static class Serializer
    {
        public static string SerializeObject(Object obj)
        {
            MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());
            XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, obj);
            memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;
            return UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray());
        }

        public static T DeserializeObject<T>(string objString)
        {
            Object obj = null;
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(StringToUTF8ByteArray(objString)))
            {
                XmlTextReader xtr = new XmlTextReader(memoryStream);
                obj = xs.Deserialize(xtr);
            }
            return (T)obj;
        }

        private static string UTF8ByteArrayToString(byte[] characters)
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            return encoding.GetString(characters);
        }

        private static byte[] StringToUTF8ByteArray(string xmlString)
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            return encoding.GetBytes(xmlString);
        }

    }

Thanks to Tom Goff for XML Serialization Sorrows article.

Thanks to Andrew Gunn for XML Serialization in C# article.