The best way to get a count of IEnumerable

Question

Whats the best/easiest way to obtain a count of items within an IEnumerable collection without enumerating over all of the items in the collection?

Possible with LIN

Answer 1

Not possible with LINQ, as calling .Count(...) does enumerate the collection. If you're running into the problem where you can't iterate through a collection twice, try this:

List myList = dataContext.MyTable.ToList();
int myTableCount = myList.Count;

foreach (MyTableItem in myList)
{
   ...
}