Problem xml-deserializing recursive nested object

Question

Solved: code below is not causing an infinite loop as I thought. the loop was in the code calling the deserialization. this posted code works just fine

I am trying to serialize and deserialize to xml the following object

public class MessageObjectCollection : List<MessageObject>
{
    public string Serialize()
    {
        return XmlObjectSerializer.SerializeObject(this);
    }

    public static MessageObjectCollection DeSerialize(string serializedPriceHistory)
    {
        return XmlObjectSerializer.DeserializeObject<MessageObjectCollection>(serializedPriceHistory);
    }
}

The MessageObject class looks like this

public class MessageObject
{
    public string Title;
    public MessageObjectCollection Responses;
}

So if I have a instance of messageobjectcollection that looks like:

var msgColl = new MessageObjectCollection
    {
         new MessageObject
              {
                   Title = "Hello",
                   Responses = new MessageObjectCollection
                        {
                             new MessageObject
                                  {
                                      Title = "hi",
                                      Responses = null
                                  }
                        }
              }
    }

I can serialize this just fine by calling var xml = msgColl.Serialize();

However when I try to deserialize this by calling var msgColl = new MessageObjectCollection().Deserialize(xml);

I get an stack overflow exception in the deserialization method:

public static T DeserializeObject<T>(string xml)
{
    T result;
    var ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
    var buffer = StringToUTF8ByteArray(xml);
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream(buffer, 0, buffer.Length))
    {
        result = (T) ser.Deserialize(stream);
    }
    return result;
}

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Im not sure if its relevant to the problem but as the Deserialize method is static shouldn't you be calling...

var msgColl = MessageObjectCollection.Deserialize(xml);

instead of...

var msgColl = new MessageObjectCollection().Deserialize(xml);

??