Pain, pain, pain configuring smartparts on sharepoint

I have lost last two days trying to make Smartpart with Ajax work on Sharepoint server. It was a nightmare, but in the end I managed to get my ajax enabled control working. Here are some tips on how to do it: 1)Before even starting to work on Smartparts, enable the Ajax on sharepoint. Exact procedure of things to do is here. 2) Add scriptmanager to the master page of a site, and remove it form controls. 3) Get smartparts from Codeplex here. 4) turn the trace on and turn of custom errors, to have an idea what went wrong. 5) make sure that you have the right assemblies registered (use reflector to get version and public key) in Sharepoint's config file. That's it.

How to serialize xml into a class

Parsing xml by using System.XML functions ain't lovely thing to do. Generating XML from class also ain't that simple. Making it generic adds a level to the problem. Yet this can be achieved by two simple functions bellow:

Imports System.Xml.Serialization
Imports System.Runtime.Serialization
Imports System.IO

Public Class Serialization
    Public Shared Function Serialize(Of T As IDeserializationCallback)(ByVal instance As T) As String
        Dim sb As New System.Text.StringBuilder
        Dim xmw As System.Xml.XmlWriter = System.Xml.XmlWriter.Create(sb)
        Dim xmlserializer As New XmlSerializer(GetType(T))
        xmlserializer.Serialize(xmw, instance)
        Return sb.ToString
    End Function

    Public Shared Function Deserialize(Of T As IDeserializationCallback)(ByVal strXml As String) As T
        Dim rdr As System.Xml.XmlReader = System.Xml.XmlReader.Create(New System.IO.StringReader(strXml))
        Dim xmlserializer As New XmlSerializer(GetType(T))
        Dim obj As T = CType(xmlserializer.Deserialize(rdr), T)
        obj.OnDeserialization(Nothing)
        Return obj
    End Function
End Class

All left to do now is call the function like:

Dim cl As ClassName
cl = Deserialize(Of ClassName)(inXml)

XML is of course an XML string that you want to deserialize.