Ice,

As you've seen, the XmlSerializer cannot deserialize XML Document
fragments with Arrays correctly -- and glancing through the Rotor source
[0], I couldn't find anything that would generate code that would be
what you are looking for.

Another solution avoiding the string concatenation would be to
deserialize one array item at a time like in the example below:

string xml =
"<MyClass><foo>foobar</foo></MyClass><MyClass><foo>bar</foo></MyClass>";
XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyClass));

XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(xml, XmlNodeType.Element,
null);
object o;
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
MyClass[] objs;

while( false == reader.EOF )
{
    o = ser.Deserialize(reader);
    list.Add(o);
}
objs = list.ToArray(typeof(MyClass)) as MyClass[];

In the example, I store all the deserialized items in an ArrayList
first, to later convert that to a type array, but you may want to work
with strongly typed collections to avoid the type conversion. You can
create those collections by hand or using a tool like CodeSmith [1].

HTH,
Christoph Schittko
MS MVP XML
http://weblogs.asp.net/cschittko

[0]
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3A1C93FA-7462-4
7D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displaylang=en
[1] http://www.ericjsmith.net/codesmith/