Coolest C# LINQ/Lambdas trick you've ever pulled?

Question

Saw a post about hidden features in C# but not a lot of people have written linq/lambdas example so... I wonder...

What\'s the coolest (as in the most

Answer 1

I think that LINQ is a major change to .NET and it is a very powerful tool.

I use LINQ to XML in production to parse and filter records from a 6MB XML file (with 20+ node levels) into a dataset in two lines of code.

Before LINQ this would have taken hundreds of lines of code and days to debug.

That's what I call elegant!

Answer 2

OLINQ reactive LINQ queries over INotifyingCollection - these allow you to do (amongst other things) realtime aggregation against large datasets.

https://github.com/wasabii/OLinq

Answer 3

I did one (a bit crazy, but interesting) thing like that just recently:

• http://tomasp.net/blog/reactive-iv-reactivegame.aspx

Answer 4

http://igoro.com/archive/extended-linq-additional-operators-for-linq-to-objects/

http://igoro.com/archive/7-tricks-to-simplify-your-programs-with-linq/

Answer 5

Not my design but I've used it a few times, a typed-switch statement: http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2008/03/30/a-functional-c-type-switch.aspx

Saved me so many if... else if... else if... else IF! statements

Answer 6

Perhaps not the coolest, but recently I have been using them anytime I have a block of code that gets C+Pd over and over again only to have a few lines change. For instance, running simple SQL commands to retrieve data can be done like so:

SqlDevice device = GetDevice();

return device.GetMultiple<Post>(
    "GetPosts",
    (s) => {
        s.Parameters.AddWithValue("@CreatedOn", DateTime.Today);

        return true;
    },
    (r, p) => {
        p.Title = r.Get<string>("Title");

        // Fill out post object

        return true;
    }
);

Which could return a list of Posts that were created today. This way I don't have to copy and paste the try-catch-finally block fifteen million times for each command, object, et cetera.