Super quick Linq to XML

I was trying to figure out how to get started with Linq to XML, and found this article. I figured I'd simplify it even more for myself :)
Imagine we have the following file, saved in c:\contacts.xml

	<contacts>
	<contact id="1">
	<firstName>Orlando</firstName>
	<lastName>Karam</lastName>
	</contact>
	<contact id="2">
	<firstName>Lina</firstName>
	<lastName>Colli</lastName>
	</contact>
	</contacts>

view raw contacts.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then we can access it as follows

	XDocument loaded = XDocument.Load(@"C:\contacts.xml");
	var contacts = from c in loaded.Descendants("contact")
	select new {
	id=(int)c.Attribute("id"),
	name=(string)c.Element("firstName") +" " +(string)c.Element("lastName"),
	};
	foreach (var c in contacts)
	Console.WriteLine("Contact: id={0}, name = {1}", c.id, c.name);

view raw sample.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Notice:

• on an XDocument, we can call descendants and pass it an element name, to get all the elements with that name (we can also call the no-args version, and get all descendants)
• What we're getting is an XElement, on which we can call methods like Element or Attribute
• We can directly cast an element into a string, and it gets us all the text inside that element
• We can cast an attribute as a string, or an int (or even a float, double or many other types)