This is the fourth post in a new series of posts regarding LINQ to XML and ASP.Net.Please do read the first post here. You can find the second post here .

You can find the third post here .

I will use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition and C# as the development language. Visual Studio 2010/2008 express editions will suffice.  

In this fourth post I will look at how to "How to sort elements with an xml file  using LINQ to XML".

1) Fire VS and create a web site. Choose an appropriate name for your site.

2) Add the existing students.xml  file in your website.

3) In the code behind file Default.aspx.cs, add the namespace

using System.Xml.Linq;

All the classes we need to manipulate XML documents are inside this namespace.

In the Page_Load  event handling routine of the default.aspx.cs file, type the following

      XElement xelement = XElement.Load(@"C:\Users\fofo\Documents\

Visual Studio 2010\WebSites\forblog\xml\students.xml");
 
 
        var cities = from thecity in xelement.Elements("Student")
        let city = (string)thecity.Element("Address").Element("City")
        orderby city descending
        select city;
 
            Response.Write("Sort all cities descending: ");
            Response.Write("<br/>");
            foreach (string mycity in cities)
            {   
                Response.Write(mycity);
                Response.Write("<br/>");
           
            }

4) In our LINQ to XML query we see  how easy is to sort using the order by clause.

        let city = (string)thecity.Element("Address").Element("City")
        orderby city descending

5) Run your application and see in the browser the following results.  

Sort all cities ascending: 
Milano
Livorno
Edinburgh
Athens

Email me if you need the source code. Hope its helps !!!!