LINQ to XML in VB.NET

Question

I\'m basically brand new to LINQ. I\'ve looked around a lot on here and am pretty confused. I\'ve seen some examples that allow me to strong type objects using LINQ but I do

Answer 1

I may be a little late to the party here, but I can't believe nobody has offered the XmlSerializer option:

Public Class Product
    Property Description As String
    Property Price As Double

    Public Shared Function FromXml(serverPath As String) As IEnumerable(Of Product)

       Using fs = IO.File.OpenRead(serverPath)
           Dim p As New Product
           Return New XmlSerializer(p.GetType).Deserialize(fs)
       End Using

    End Function

End Class

You can then return an iEnumerable of Product from the shared function:

dim listOfProducts = Product.FromXml(Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/products.xml"))

This doesn't use LinqToXml as such, but it deserializes the xml to an iEnumerable of product, which you can use Linq on as usual.