Adding elements to an xml file in C#

You're close, but you want name to be an XAttribute rather than XElement:

 XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(spath); 
 XElement root = new XElement("Snippet"); 
 root.Add(new XAttribute("name", "name goes here")); 
 root.Add(new XElement("SnippetCode", "SnippetCode")); 
 doc.Element("Snippets").Add(root); 
 doc.Save(spath); 

You need to create a new XAttribute instead of XElement. Try something like this:

public static void Test()
{
    var xdoc = XDocument.Parse(@"
        <Snippets>

          <Snippet name='abc'>
            <SnippetCode>
              testcode1
            </SnippetCode>
          </Snippet>

          <Snippet name='xyz'>
            <SnippetCode>      
             testcode2
            </SnippetCode>
          </Snippet>

        </Snippets>");

    xdoc.Root.Add(
        new XElement("Snippet",
            new XAttribute("name", "name goes here"),
            new XElement("SnippetCode", "SnippetCode"))
    );
    xdoc.Save(@"C:\TEMP\FOO.XML");
}

This generates the output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Snippets>
  <Snippet name="abc">
    <SnippetCode>
      testcode1
    </SnippetCode>
  </Snippet>
  <Snippet name="xyz">
    <SnippetCode>      
     testcode2
    </SnippetCode>
  </Snippet>
  <Snippet name="name goes here">
    <SnippetCode>SnippetCode</SnippetCode>
  </Snippet>
</Snippets>

If you want to add an attribute, and not an element, you have to say so:

XElement root = new XElement("Snippet");
root.Add(new XAttribute("name", "name goes here"));
root.Add(new XElement("SnippetCode", "SnippetCode"));

The code above produces the following XML element:

<Snippet name="name goes here">
  <SnippetCode>SnippetCode</SnippetCode>
</Snippet> 

I'd be inclined to create classes that match the structure and add an instance to a collection then serialise and deserialise the collection to load and save the document.

I've used XDocument.Root.Add to add elements. Root returns XElement which has an Add function for additional XElements