I want to send a binary file to .net c# component in the following xml format

<BinaryFileString fileType='pdf'>
    <!--binary file data string here-->
</BinaryFileString>

In the component that is called I will use the above xml string and convert the binary string recieved within the BinaryFileString tag, into a file as specified by the filetype='' attribute. The file type could be doc/pdf/xls/rtf

I have the code in the calling application to get out the bytes from the file to be sent. How do I prepare it to be sent with xml tags wrapped around it? I want the application to send out a string to the component and not a byte stream. This is because there is no way I can decipher the file type [pdf/doc/xls] by just looking at the byte stream. Hence the xml string with the filetype attribute. Any ideas on this?

method for extracting Bytes below

           FileStream fs = new FileStream(_filePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);

            using (Stream input = fs)
            {
                byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
                int bytesRead;
                while ((bytesRead = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
                {

                }
            }
            return buffer;

Thanks.