Default size for VARCHAR

What is the output of this statement?
select cast('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890' as varchar)

It's
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234

Why?
Because, CAST uses a default size of 30 for varchar!
Always make sure you specify the size of your dataypes to avoid such gotchas.

XmlSerializationHelper

This is one of those helper classes that I keep using very often.

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

public class XmlSerializationHelper<T> where T : class
    {
        public string Serialize(T objectToSerialize)
        {
            var sb = new StringBuilder();
            var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            using (var writer = new StringWriter(sb))
            {
                serializer.Serialize(writer, objectToSerialize);
            }
            return sb.ToString();
        }

        public T Deserialize(string xml)
        {
            var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            return (T)serializer.Deserialize(new StringReader(xml));
        }
    }

Usage:
string xml = new XmlSerializationHelper<SomeClass>().Serialize(obj);
AND
SomeClass obj = new XmlSerializationHelper<SomeClass>().Deserialize(xml);
Note: I am not using var here, just so that its clear what the return types are.