What's the difference between XElement and XDocument?

Question

What is the difference between XElement and XDocument and when do you use each?

Answer 1

From MSDN:

Note that you only have to create XDocument objects if you require the specific functionality provided by the XDocument class. In many circumstances, you can work directly with XElement. Working directly with XElement is a simpler programming model.

XDocument derives from XContainer. Therefore, it can contain child nodes. However, XDocument objects can have only one child XElement node. This reflects the XML standard that there can be only one root element in an XML document.