Hi Ntwiles,
When dealing with arrays, the default XML serializer expects you to use <Item> tags for each element of the array, not the the array type (char in your case).

Try this XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<XnaContent>
  <Asset Type="SharedContent.Level">
    <map>
      <Item>13</Item>
    </map>
  </Asset>
</XnaContent>

Hi Daniel,
I did not use any extension libraries or custom importers/processors. I just added the xml file to the Content Library using all the default stuff. As for getting the serializer to recognize your custom types, you probably need to add a namespace qualifier to the start of your type names. Something like this:

namespace MyNameSpace
{
    public class MySubClass0 : MyBaseClass
    {
        public int MySubData0;
    }
}

    <Item Type="MyNameSpace.MySubClass0">

I dug into it a bit more and managed to answer my own question. I hand created an instance of my object array and then followed the instructions in this article to write the array to an xml file: http://msdn.microsof...y/ff604982.aspx

Looking at the output, it appears I needed a Type attribute on each Item node to specify the type. So my modified XML file looks like this:

<XnaContent>
    <Asset Type="MyBaseClass[]">
        <Item Type="MySubClass0"> 
            <MyBaseData>alpha</MyBaseData>
            <MySubData0>314</MySubData0>
        </Item>
        <Item Type="MySubClass1">
            <MyBaseData>bravo</MyBaseData>
            <MySubData1>true</MySubData1>
        </Item>
    </Asset>
</XnaContent>