a c# function to read XML. I think I should be using XMLReader() instead, but this works fine.

xmlreader.cs

public static Dictionary<string, string> ReadXML(string filename)
        {

            Dictionary<string, string> dcxml_config = new Dictionary<string, string>();

            //thank you: http://www.mastercsharp.com/Article/69/working-with-xml-dom
            FileStream docIn = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite);
            XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
            xmldoc.Load(docIn);
            docIn.Close();
            //read some of the appSettings from the XML file into a key/value store (dictionary)
            XmlNodeList nodelist = xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName("appSettings");

            foreach (XmlElement node in nodelist)
            {
                XmlNodeList childnodes = node.ChildNodes;

                foreach (XmlElement cnode in childnodes)
                {
                    XmlAttributeCollection fcn_attributes = cnode.Attributes;
                    //this is only proprietary in that the names of the attribute names are considered to be objects.
                    // we have to consider that there are only two elements, since we are adding them into a dictionary as key,value pairs.

                    string key = "";
                    string value = "";

                    foreach (XmlAttribute fcn_attribute in fcn_attributes)
                    {
                        if (fcn_attribute.Name == "key")
                        {
                            key = fcn_attribute.Value;
                        }

                        if (fcn_attribute.Name == "value")
                        {
                            value = fcn_attribute.Value;
                        }
                    }
                    dcxml_config.Add(key, value);
                }
            }

            //done reading the config out of the XML
            //maybe a check like we did for the input arguments here would be good...
            // maybe via it's own function
            return dcxml_config;

        }