I have a couple of XML files that I need to work with, and I\'ve always used the XElement objects and pulled the data via the attribute name or the XElement\'s value.
You could put annotations on your class and then use an XmlSerializer to serialize/deserialize your class instances to/from XML - if you need a more customized approach have your class also implement IXmlSerializable then put that serialization/deserialization code within the class.