GenXJamerican

A couple of days ago, while pairing with my colleague Alexei on bug fixes to a new feature, we came across a bit of code that attempted to take an integer array and construct a string with a comma-delimited list of the numbers from it. The existing code didn’t quite work, so we wrote a basic for-each loop and used ReSharper to see what LINQ alternative it might construct. Here’s what ReSharper came up with: int[] numbers = new[] {1, 5, 8, 26, 35, 42}; var result = numbers.Aggregate("", (current, item) => current + item.ToString() + “,");

Before ReSharper served this up, I wasn’t familiar with the Aggregate operator. When I checked out 101 LINQ Samples for it, the vast majority of the examples used numbers.

One of the bugs I was recently asked to fix for an application required me to determine whether or not to display one of the members of a list.  This proved somewhat challenging since the lists in question were heterogeneous (two difference subtypes of an abstract base class).  It turned out that LINQ provides a nice solution to this sort of problem in the form of the OfType<T> method.

Given an IEnumerable collection with elements of multiple types, calling OfType<T> on the collection where T is the desired type will return a collection containing only elements of type T.  Before learning about OfType<T>, I’d been using the Cast<T> method.  This was fine as long as all the collection elements were of the type T I wanted.  The moment this wasn’t the case, my LINQ query threw a cast exception.  OfType<T> seems to work similarly to the “as” operator in C#, in that it doesn’t complain if a list element isn’t type T–it simply excludes it from the returned collection.