Serializing to XML is easy in .NET. All you have to do is make sure you have a default constructor and all the fields you want to serialise accessible either directly or through properties. Well, not quite. There are also restrictions regarding the values of the fields that are serialised. To be more precise, some characters will cause de-serialisation to fail with an InvalidOperationException even though serialisation was successful.

It is important to understand that these restrictions are not posed by the .NET implementation of XML serialisation, but rather by the standard itself (you can have a look at the XML specification for the exact details on valid character ranges). In other words this should not be a problem, as you should not have XML containing such characters. It is just annoying that you are not aware of the issue until the de-serialisation process. Having said that, it is possible to successfully de-serialize XML that contains illegal characters using XmlTextReader and passing an instance of it to the XmlSerializer. Here is an example:

      XmlSerializer deSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SomeClass));

      XmlTextReader xmlTextReader = new XmlTextReader(someStream);

      SomeClass comeClass = (SomeClass) deSerializer.Deserialize(xmlTextReader);