Mickey Williams @ Neudesic

Although most of the examples that you see in MSDN and elsewhere online assume a hardcoded type for an object being serilized, it's fairly easy to use a generic method that's parameterized for the object to be serialized:

void SerializeToXml<T>(T thing, string path)
{
    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlTextWriter.Create(path, null))
    {
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        serializer.Serialize(writer, thing);
    }
}

The client-side usage pattern is straight-forward:

       SerializeToXml(myObj, @"c:\xml\myObj.xml");

You can use similar code to deserialize:

T DeserializeFromXml<T>(string path)
{
    using (XmlReader reader = XmlTextReader.Create(path, null))
    {
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        return (T)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
    }
}

As the type of T is not discoverable in the actual parameter list, the consumer of this method must explicitly parameterize the call (note that a cast is not required):

       MyObj theObj = DeserializeFromXml<MyObj>(@"c:\xml\myObj.xml");