Over the last few weeks I have been writing about the basics of LINQ, and how we can use it to organize collections of items.
Today I would like to take a look at a special class of LINQ methods: those returning single elements or values, instead of an entire collection.
I my recent posts introducing LINQ from a game developers point of view, I mentioned several times how the many LINQ methods returning sequences of the IEnumerable<T> type do not actually return an actual collection.
Instead they return a query that can be executed any number of time on the given input collection.
Of course, there comes a point at which we need to store the results of such queries as regular collections. Today we will talk about how LINQ supports this almost trivially.
Last week I introduced LINQ from the perspective of a C# game developer completely unfamiliar with the framework. Today I would like to continue exploration of LINQ by focussing on a particular set of its functionality: methods to arrange and organize data.
In particular we will look into how we can sort and group our collections of items.