I don’t know a way of validating without the exception, but you can change the debugger settings to only break for XmlException
if it’s unhandled – that should solve your immediate issues, even if the code is still inelegant.
To do this, go to Debug / Exceptions… / Common Language Runtime Exceptions and find System.Xml.XmlException, then make sure only “User-unhandled” is ticked (not Thrown).