C# XML Serialization Problem

I have created a method that accepts an object then attempts to serialize the object to Xml by first using the XmlSerializer to serialize to a string, then load the Xml back into an XmlDocument object for the method to return. The code looks like this;

 public static XmlDocument ConvertObjectToXMLMessage(object ObjectToConvert)
    {
        MemoryStream stream = null;
        XmlWriter writer = null;
        XmlSerializer serializer = null;
        XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
        UnicodeEncoding utf = new UnicodeEncoding();
        UTF8Encoding utf8 = new UTF8Encoding();
        ASCIIEncoding ascii = new ASCIIEncoding();
        string result = string.Empty;

        try
        {
            stream = new MemoryStream();
            //writer = new StreamWriter(stream, Encoding.Unicode);
            XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
            settings.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
            writer = XmlWriter.Create(stream, settings);                

            serializer = new XmlSerializer(ObjectToConvert.GetType());
            serializer.Serialize(writer, ObjectToConvert);

            int count = Convert.ToInt32(stream.Length);
            Byte[] arr = new Byte[count];

            stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

            stream.Read(arr, 0, count);

            result = utf8.GetString(arr).Trim();

            // if this is being used during a debug session, the xml will be written to the Debug Console
#if DEBUG
            //blank line before
            Debug.WriteLine(string.Empty);
            // output result
            Debug.Write(result);
            //blank line after
            Debug.WriteLine(string.Empty);
#endif

            xmlDoc.LoadXml(result);

            return xmlDoc;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            throw ex;
        }
        finally
        {
            if (write开发者_如何学Cr != null)
                writer.Close();
        }
    }

All works well until the xmlDoc.LoadXml(result) command. This throws an exception; {"Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1."}

As you can see, I have declared a number of encoding variables. If I use the ASCII encoding, it works. I need to use UTF8.

Any ideas why this does not work? I think it is because of spurious characters being inserted at the start of the Xml ofter serialisation. How do I avoid this? The types of classes that I could be serializing would be entity framework objects or proxy classed generated from XSD's or WSDL.

What if you load the stream directly without manually reading it or converting it?

XmlDocument xd = new XmlDocument();
xd.Load( stream );

This will at least reduce the number of places an error could be occurring.

The code seems to be just fine... are you opening with an editor before trying to access your file by code?

I got that problem with an editor that was adding some stuff in my file