 <p>If you could change your student class properties to match the Xml element names and/or decorate the properties with attributes indicating what XML value goes to what class property, then you could use the .Net to deserialise the XML into a List Students in one line.</p> <p>Then just persist to the DB as you normally would.</p> <p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/364253/how-to-deserialize-xml-document">Here's an example</a></p>