How to deserialize xml to object [duplicate]

Question

Your classes should look like this

[XmlRoot("StepList")]
public class StepList
{
    [XmlElement("Step")]
    public List<Step> Steps { get; set; }
}

public class Step
{
    [XmlElement("Name")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
    [XmlElement("Desc")]
    public string Desc { get; set; }
}

Here is my testcode.

string testData = @"<StepList>
                        <Step>
                            <Name>Name1</Name>
                            <Desc>Desc1</Desc>
                        </Step>
                        <Step>
                            <Name>Name2</Name>
                            <Desc>Desc2</Desc>
                        </Step>
                    </StepList>";

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(StepList));
using (TextReader reader = new StringReader(testData))
{
    StepList result = (StepList) serializer.Deserialize(reader);
}

If you want to read a text file you should load the file into a FileStream and deserialize this.

using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream("<PathToYourFile>", FileMode.Open)) 
{
    StepList result = (StepList) serializer.Deserialize(fileStream);
}

The comments above are correct. You're missing the decorators. If you want a generic deserializer you can use this.

public static T DeserializeXMLFileToObject<T>(string XmlFilename)
{
    T returnObject = default(T);
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(XmlFilename)) return default(T);

    try
    {
        StreamReader xmlStream = new StreamReader(XmlFilename);
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        returnObject = (T)serializer.Deserialize(xmlStream);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        ExceptionLogger.WriteExceptionToConsole(ex, DateTime.Now);
    }
    return returnObject;
}

Then you'd call it like this:

MyObjType MyObj = DeserializeXMLFileToObject<MyObjType>(FilePath);