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

When I want to use the Count property, I use ILIST which implements IEnumerable and ICollection interfaces. The ILIST data structure is an Array. I stepped through using the VS Debugger and found that the .Count property below returns the Array.Length property.

IList FileServerVideos = Directory.GetFiles(VIDEOSERVERPATH, "*.mp4"); 
if (FileServerVideos.Count == 0)
    return;