Solve real coding problems
Articles about using Linq in C# to solve a wide variety of problems in a functional manner. A few examples including filtering collections, calculating aggregate values, and querying XML.
Use the XElement class (from the Linq-to-Xml API) to parse XML and work with it in memory. You can use this to search for XML elements, attributes, and modify values. This is an alternative to deserializing to an object (which requires you to define a class that matches the XML structure). I’ll show examples of … Read more
XML elements can have attributes, which are key-value pairs. To read the attributes, use the XElement class (from the Linq-to-Xml API). There are two main methods for getting attributes: Once you have the attributes, use the XAttribute.Value property to read the attribute’s string value. Here’s an example of getting all elements named Movie and then … Read more
Here’s an example of using the Linq GroupBy() method to group coders by language: This example outputs the following: GroupBy() produces groups that contain the grouping key (i.e. Language) and the list of objects in the group (i.e. the Coder objects). The GroupBy() syntax is complex because it supports many scenarios. You can select one … Read more
There are three ways to select distinct objects based on a property using Linq methods: These select one movie per year: GroupBy() is the simplest because it doesn’t require any additional code. Distinct() is faster but it’s more complicated. DistinctBy() is the fastest and simplest, but requires the most code (it requires .NET 6 or … Read more
You can use Linq methods to do set operations (intersection, union, difference, and symmetric difference). These work on any type that implements IEnumerable – such as lists, arrays, and sets. I’ll explain these set operations and show how to do them with Linq methods. Set intersection with Intersect() The intersection of set A {1,2} and … Read more
To sort a list, except for the first element, you need to: This can be accomplished in a single line using Linq methods: Example – sorting a list of people Let’s say we have a list of people, such as the following: Here’s how to sort the people by first name, except for the first … Read more
Problem You are trying to use a lambda expression on a dynamic object and get the following compiler error: Cannot use a lambda expression as an argument to a dynamically dispatched operation without first casting it to a delegate or expression tree type. As an example, the following code causes this error: Solution Cast the … Read more
Use the OrderBy() and ThenBy() Linq methods when you want to sort by multiple fields, like this: Ascending vs Descending order By default, OrderBy() and ThenBy() sort in ascending order. If you want to sort by descending order, use the Descending version of each method. For example, if I want to sort NFL teams within … Read more
Problem When you call .First() on an empty IEnumerable, you get the following exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains no elements Solution Option 1 – Use .FirstOrDefault() instead of .First() When the IEnumerable is empty, .FirstOrDefault() returns the default value for the type. For reference types this returns null. For value types this returns 0 or that … Read more
Problem Any time you try to use a Linq extension method (such as Select() to transform list elements) and you haven’t added ‘using System.Linq’, you’ll get a compiler error like this: Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘Your Type’. ‘Select’ not found. In newer versions, the error looks like … Read more
