How can I build XML in C#?

Question

How can I generate valid XML in C#?

Answer 1

The best thing hands down that I have tried is LINQ to XSD (which is unknown to most developers). You give it an XSD Schema and it generates a perfectly mapped complete strongly-typed object model (based on LINQ to XML) for you in the background, which is really easy to work with - and it updates and validates your object model and XML in real-time. While it's still "Preview", I have not encountered any bugs with it.

If you have an XSD Schema that looks like this:

Then you can simply build XML like this:

RootElement rootElement = new RootElement;
rootElement.Element1 = "Element1";
rootElement.Element2 = "Element2";
rootElement.Attribute1 = 5;
rootElement.Attribute2 = true;

Or simply load an XML from file like this:

RootElement rootElement = RootElement.Load(filePath);

Or save it like this:

rootElement.Save(string);
rootElement.Save(textWriter);
rootElement.Save(xmlWriter);

rootElement.Untyped also yields the element in form of a XElement (from LINQ to XML).