Can I serialize Anonymous Types as xml?

Question

I understood that anonymous types are marked private by the compiler and the properties are read-only. Is there a way to serialize them to xml (without deserialize) ? It wor

Answer 1

The answer below handles IEnumerables in the way I needed and will turn this:

new
{
    Foo = new[]
    {
        new { Name = "One" },
        new { Name = "Two" },
    },
    Bar = new[]
    {
        new { Name = "Three" },
        new { Name = "Four" },
    },
}

into this:

So here you go, yet another variant of Matthew's answer:

public static class Tools
{
    private static readonly Type[] WriteTypes = new[] {
        typeof(string),
        typeof(Enum),
        typeof(DateTime), typeof(DateTime?),
        typeof(DateTimeOffset), typeof(DateTimeOffset?),
        typeof(int), typeof(int?),
        typeof(decimal), typeof(decimal?),
        typeof(Guid), typeof(Guid?),
    };
    public static bool IsSimpleType(this Type type)
    {
        return type.IsPrimitive || WriteTypes.Contains(type);
    }
    public static object ToXml(this object input)
    {
        return input.ToXml(null);
    }
    public static object ToXml(this object input, string element)
    {
        if (input == null)
            return null;

        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(element))
            element = "object";
        element = XmlConvert.EncodeName(element);
        var ret = new XElement(element);

        if (input != null)
        {
            var type = input.GetType();

            if (input is IEnumerable && !type.IsSimpleType())
            {
                var elements = (input as IEnumerable