Building a dictionary of counts of items in a list

Question

I have a List containing a bunch of strings that can occur more than once. I would like to take this list and build a dictionary of the list items as the key and the count

Answer 1

Well, there isn't really any better way to do it.

Perhaps you could write a LINQ query that would group the strings and then count how many strings there are in each group, but that would not be nearly as efficient as what you already have.