Code Reference A collection of code for my reference (and perhaps other people too)

Deserialize XML to an Object

One of the more useful tools to have in your toolbox is a method or class to convert an Object to XML and XML to an Object.

Converting XML to an object is very easy.

You need your destination object:

public class PersonObject
{
    public string lastName;
    public string firstName;
    public string gender;
    public string email;
    public int age;
    public int telephone;
    public string city;
    public string state;

    public PersonObject() {}
}

Most likely you will recieve your XML from a web service. Here is some simple code to call a webservice and get the XML response:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
byte[] buf = new byte[8192];
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.someurl.com/getPerson?...");
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();

string tempString = null;
int count = 0;
do
{
    count = resStream.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length);
    if (count != 0)
    {
        tempString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buf, 0, count);
        sb.Append(tempString);
    }
}
while (count > 0); 

PersonObject person = (PersonObject)XmlToObject(sb.ToString(), typeof(PersonObject));

Here is the method to convert the XML to the PersonObject:

private object XmlToObject(string XmlToConvert, Type DestinationType)
{
    XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(DestinationType);
    StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(XmlToConvert);
    XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(stringReader);
    object returnObject = serializer.Deserialize(xmlReader);
    xmlReader.Close();
    stringReader.Close();
    return returnObject;
}

It is just a few lines of code. Very simple.
You will notice the PersonObject does not contain any XML attributes for basic use.