Anonymous type collections?

Question

I am looking for best practices for creating collections made from anonymous types.

There are several approaches - this one and most answers on this thread assume th

Answer 1

One option is to use an example item to create the collection via generic type inference, for example:

    static List CreateEmptyList(T template) {
        return new List();
    }
    void Foo() {
        var list = CreateEmptyList(new { Foo = "abc" });
        list.Add(new { Foo = "def" });
        //...
    }

You can also do this without creating an instance (but using an anonymous method that never gets caller), but I don't think it saves anything really... we might not create an instance of the object, but we do create an instance of a delegate, so not much of a saving...

You also mention sorting the data; see the reply here for a way to use List.Sort with a lambda, and hence with anonymous types - i.e.

list.Sort(x=>x.Foo);