Stupid LINQ Tricks

Over a month ago I did a presentation on LINQ and promised a few people I’d share the code from the session. Better late than never, eh?

We warmed up by building our own filtering operator to use in a query. The operator takes an Expression<Predicate<T>>, which we need to compile before we invoking the predicate inside.

public static class MyExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<T> Where<T>(
                  this IEnumerable<T> sequence,
                  Expression<Predicate<T>> filter)
    {
        foreach (T item in sequence)
        {
            if (filter.Compile()(item))
            {
                yield return item;
            }
        }
    }
}

The following query uses our custom Where operator:

IEnumerable<Employee> employees = new List<Employee>()
{
    new Employee() { ID= 1, Name="Scott" },
    new Employee() { ID =2, Name="Paul" }
};


Employee scott =
    employees.Where(e => e.Name == "Scott").First();

Of course, if we are just going to compile and invoke the expression there is little advantage to using an Expression<T>, but it generally turns into an “a-ha!” moment when you show someone the difference between an Expression<Predicate<T>> and a plain Predicate<T>. Try it yourself in a debugger.

We also wrote a LINQ version of “Hello, World!” that reads text files from a temp directory (a.txt would contain “Hello,”, while b.txt would contain “World!”. A good demonstration of map-filter-reduce with C# 3.0.

var message = Directory.GetFiles(@"c:\temp\")
                       .Where(fname => fname.EndsWith(".txt"))
                       .Select(fname => File.ReadAllText(fname))
                       .Aggregate(
                           new StringBuilder(),
                          (sb, s) => sb.Append(s).Append(" "),
                          sb => sb.ToString()
                       );


Console.WriteLine(message);

Moving into NDepend territory, we also wrote a query to find the namespaces with the most types (for referenced assemblies only):

var groups = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
         .GetReferencedAssemblies()
         .Select(aname => Assembly.Load(aname))
         .SelectMany(asm => asm.GetExportedTypes())
         .GroupBy(t => t.Namespace)
         .OrderByDescending(g => g.Count())
         .Take(10);

foreach (var group in groups)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", group.Key, group.Count());
    foreach (var type in group)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("\t" + type.Name);
    }
}

And finally, some LINQ to XML code that creates an XML document out of all the executing processes on the machine:

XNamespace ns = "http://odetocode.com/schemas/linqdemo";
XNamespace ext = "http://odetocode.com/schemas/extensions";

XDocument doc =
    new XDocument(
        new XElement(ns + "Processes",
            new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "ext", ext),
            from p in Process.GetProcesses()
            select new XElement(ns + "Process",
               new XAttribute("Name", p.ProcessName),
               new XAttribute(ext + "PID", p.Id))));

Followed by a query for the processes ID of any mspaint instances:

var query =
   (from e in doc.Descendants(ns + "Process")
    where (string)e.Attribute("Name") == "mspaint"
    select (string)e.Attribute(ext + "PID"));

More on LINQ to come…