Simplify Using Xml Data with AutoMapper and Linq-To-Xml

I recently ran into a scenario at work that required manually consuming several SOAP web services, which I’m sure you can imagine was rather monotonous. A co-worker (Seth Carney) and I tried a few different approaches, but we finally settled on a solution that simplified consumption of the xml and ultimately made the code more testable. That solution centered around leveraging AutoMapper, an open source object-object mapping tool, to create a link between the XElements returned in the SOAP messages and custom contracts we created – in a reusable manner. I put together a quick demo that shows how you could use the same approach to consume and display the Twitter Public Timeline (using the API’s Xml response type).