Serialize and deserialize objects as Xml using generic types in C# 2.0

I've been using Object<>Xml serialization in.NET based on for a while. I decided to enhance it a tad bit with some generics, so I could use it more broadly. Here's what I came up with:

using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Text;using System.Xml;using System.IO;using System.Xml.Serialization;

///

/// To convert a Byte Array of Unicode values (UTF-8 encoded) to a complete String.///

/// Unicode Byte Array to be converted to String /// String converted from Unicode Byte Array private static string UTF8ByteArrayToString(byte[] characters) {    UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding;    string constructedString = encoding.GetString(characters);    return (constructedString); }

///

/// Converts the String to UTF8 Byte array and is used in De serialization///

/// /// private static Byte[] StringToUTF8ByteArray(string pXmlString) {    UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding;    byte[] byteArray = encoding.GetBytes(pXmlString);    return byteArray; }

///

/// Serialize an object into an XML string///

/// /// /// public static string SerializeObject(T obj) {    try   {       string xmlString = null;       MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream;       XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));       XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);       xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, obj);       memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;       xmlString = UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray);      return xmlString;    }   catch   {       return string.Empty;    } }

///

/// Reconstruct an object from an XML string///

/// /// public static T DeserializeObject(string xml) {    XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));    MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(StringToUTF8ByteArray(xml));    XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);    return (T)xs.Deserialize(memoryStream); }