How to get xmlItem.Value even if Element does not exist?

I am starting out with xml and vb.net here, my xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Steps>
  <X cmd="Message">
    <Message>Hello World</Message>
  </X>
  <X cmd="Message">
    <Message>Hello World2</Message>
    <Title>Cool Message</Title>
  </X>
</Steps>

I have enumerated the whole xml and can access the items like this in one of my method:

Function showmsg(ByVal X As XmlElement)
Dim xTitle as String = X.Item("Title"开发者_开发百科).innerText
Dim xMessage as String = X.Item("Message").innerText
MsgBox(xMessage, , xTitle)
End Function

sooo, it works if all the elements are found (< Message > and < Title >).. but if for example the element "< Title >" is not found I get an error by trying to get the innerText.

Is there a way to ignore these errors, I just want to receive an empty value and not any errors. maybe there is a better way to do this?

---

You'll need to check if

X.Item("Title") Is Nothing

before retrieving its value

The other option is to us Try/Catch to ignore the errors, but that is going to slow you way down and get messy.