[C#] XML - Class Structure

Hey all :) I have had a bit of a search around for this, but I haven't started developing anything yet, for the hope that there's an easier way. I'm using C#/Mono on Linux, but Mono is an almost full implementation of .NET, so suggest based on .NET. Don't ask why I'm using this platform: basically, it's the lesser of 4 evils that are valid platforms for a competition I'm entering. Basically what I want to do is read an XML element into an instance of a class, basically to get something like this:

<Particle>
    <Lifetime>100</Lifetime>
    <Sprite>smoke1.png</Sprite>
    <DeltaSpeedMin>1</DeltaSpeedMin>
    <DeltaSpeedMax>2</DeltaSpeedMax>
    <DeltaAngleMin>0</DeltaAngleMin>
    <DeltaAngleMax>0</DeltaAngleMax>
    <InitialAlpha>1</InitialAlpha>
    <DeltaAlphaMin>0</DeltaAlphaMin>
    <DeltaAlphaMax>0</DeltaAlphaMax>
</Particle>

into this:

public class Particle {
        // these will be set at runtime, not constants
        public double x;
        public double y;
        public double Speed;
        public double Angle;
        int Ticks;

        // these will be read from XML
        int Lifetime;
        String Sprite;

        double DeltaSpeedMin;
        double DeltaSpeedMax;
        double DeltaAngleMin;
        double DeltaAngleMax;

        double InitialAlpha; // 0..1
        double DeltaAlphaMin;
        double DeltaAlphaMax;
}

Now, the obvious solution would be to use the .NET XML parser to get an XML node tree structure, then do manual assignments for each instance - but that seems like a poor solution, with every member added needing changes to the parser as well. I come from a perl background, so I would normally use an associative array rather than a fixed structure, which makes this kind of thing easy as anything - but for obvious reasons, that's much too slow when I'm processing so many particles per frame. I'm _hoping_ there's an easy way to do this, probably facilitated through the fact that .NET is bytecode and not fully compiled - does anyone have any tips?