If you want to go with a fluent approach rather than getter/setter,
you'd need to handle IXmlSerializable yourself; note that you'd also
lose automatic schema visibility, and the ability to do standard data-
binding. And probably a few other ComponentModel things that I'm
forgetting. This sounds unncessarily painful.

Can I ask what the driver is for fluent in this case? If the problem
is primarily at instantiation, then perhaps consider C# 3 object
initializers? i.e.

Foo foo = new Foo {Width = 100, Length = 20, Name = "Fred", Foo =
"Bar", When = DateTime.Now };

Marc