What is the best way to read and write cXML documents in C#?

I know this is a vague open ended question. I'm hoping to get some general direction.

I need to add cXML punchout to an ASP.NET C# site / application. This is replacing something that I wrote years ago in ColdFusion.

I'm a reasonably experienced C# developer but I haven't done much with XML. There seems to be lots of different options for processing XML in .NET.

Here's the open ended question: Assuming that I have an XML document in some form, eg a file or a string, what is the best way to read it into my code? I want to get the data and then query databases etc. The cXML document size and our traffic volumes are easily small enough so that loading the a cXML document into memory is not a problem.

Should I:

1) Manually build classes based on the dtd and use the XML Serializer?

2) Use a tool to generate classes. There are sample cXML files downloadable from Ariba.com. I tried xsd.exe to generate an xsd and then xsd.exe /c to generate classes. When I try to deserialize I get errors because there seems to be "confusion" around whether some elements should be single values or arrays.

I tried the CodeXS online tool but that gives errors in it's lo开发者_运维技巧g and errors if I try to deserialize a sample document.

2) Create a dataset and ReadXml()?

3) Create a typed dataset and ReadXml()?

4) Use Linq to XML. I often use Linq to Objects so I'm familiar with Linq in general but I'm struggling to see what it gives me in this situation.

5) Some other means.

I guess I need to improve my understanding of XML in general but even so ... am I missing some obvious way of doing this? In the old ColdFusion site I found a free component ("tag") which basically ignored any schema and read the XML into a "structure" which is essentially a series of nested hash tables which was then easy to read in code. That was probably quite sloppy but it worked.

I also need to generate XML files from my C# objects. Maybe Linq to XML will be good for that. I could start with a default "template" document and manipulate it before saving.

Thanks for any pointers ...

If you need to generate arbitrary XML in an exact format, you should generate it manually using LINQ-to-XML.