...I found this in my development group less than 12 hours after the previous post, helping to reaffirm my suprise that there are not more examples of the easy way...

 

using System;

using System.Xml.Serialization;

using System.IO;

...

public string ToXml()

      {

            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(

typeof( MyClass)

);

                  //create a stream

            MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();

            XmlTextWriter xtw = new XmlTextWriter(

ms,

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8

);

            ser.Serialize(xtw, this);

            // read stream to string

            ms.Position = 0;

            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms);

            string Xml = sr.ReadToEnd();

            ms.Close();

            sr.Close();

            return( Xml );

      }