Working with XML

Question

I\'m planning to create a news item which uses xml as it\'s backend and the Display should be like:

Date: 08/Mar/2010
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Title &

Answer 1

There are a million ways to do this. The approach I'd take in the situation you described:

1. Build an class whose properties are the data elements I need to collect.
2. Either use XML serialization (if I'm not conforming to a specific schema, this is the approach requiring the least code) or build a method into the class that used XDocument or XmlWriter to produce the XML.
3. Write test cases to test the class and its XML-generation method.
4. Build the form.
5. Bind the UI controls to the properties of an instance of my class.

What I wouldn't do: Write a method in the form that pulls data out of the form controls and writes them to XML.