SqlServer Converting XML to varbinary and parsing it in .NET (C#) - sql-server

Question

Consider the following code:
[Test]
public void StackOverflowQuestionTest()
{
const string connectionString = "enter your connection string if you wanna test this code";
byte[] result = null;
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
connection.Open();
using (var sqlCommand = new SqlCommand("declare #xml as xml = '<xml/>' SELECT convert(varbinary(max), #xml) as value"))
//using (var sqlCommand = new SqlCommand("SELECT convert(varbinary(max), N'<xml/>') as value"))
{
sqlCommand.Connection = connection;
using (SqlDataReader reader = sqlCommand.ExecuteReader())
{
while (reader.Read())
{
result = (byte[])reader["value"];
}
reader.Close();
}
}
}
string decodedString = new UnicodeEncoding(false, true).GetString(result);
var document = XElement.Parse(decodedString);
}
If I run this test I get an XmlException with message : "Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1." As it turns out the problem is "0xFFFE" preamble which is considered as invalid character.
Note that if I use commented string instead, everything works just fine, which is strange as per me. Looks like SqlServer stores XML strings in UCS-2 with a BOM, and at the same time it stores nvarchar values without it.
The main question is: how can I decode this byte array to string which will not contain this preamble (BOM)?

Answer 1

In case anyone will need this in future, the following code works:
using(var ms = new MemoryStream(result))
{
using (var sr = new StreamReader(ms, Encoding.Unicode, true))
{
decodedString = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
}