XML Serialization/Deserialization in C#

Here is a code snippet that I continuously use; it is used to serialize an object to a string and deserialize an object from a string. (The interesting thing to see here is during serialization the code uses a StringBuilder object which is passed to an XMLWriter which is in turn sent to the XMLSerializer).

public static object Deserialize(string data, Type dataType)  
{   
    using (TextReader rd = new StringReader(data))   
    {
        XmlSerializer sr = new XmlSerializer(dataType);
        return sr.Deserialize(rd);   
     }  
}

public static string Serialize(object item)  
{   
    StringBuilder bld = new StringBuilder();   
    using (XmlWriter xmlWr = XmlWriter.Create(bld))   
    {
          XmlSerializer sr = new XmlSerializer(item.GetType());    
          sr.Serialize(xmlWr, item);    
          return bld.ToString();
     }  
}