I wrote this to show an example for a problem a friend of mine 
was experiencing with UTF-8 and serializing the data.

This covers the {"Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1."} and There is an error in XML document (1, 1) errors.

Look on
http://kristofmattei.be/2012/06/10/deserializing-xml-data-at-the-root-level-is-invalid-line-1-position-1-and-there-is-an-error-in-xml-document-1-1/
to find more info