Sean Lynch

I finally had a chance to sit and work with LINQ for a bit, and while it is very cool, a little bit of its luster was lost when I can assign interfaces to the anonymous classes generated by the queries. Meaning I can not do something like:

public interface IExample
{
    string Name { get; set; }
    string Description { get; set; }
}
public class DataGenerator
{
    public IEnumerable<IExample> GetExamples(string categoryName)
    {        //Context Definition        IEnumerable<IExample> examples =
            from x in db.Examples //LINQ to SQL Class            where x.Category.Name = categoryName
            select new IExamples { Name = x.Name                                 , Description = x.Description } ;
            // There is probobly better syntax for this
        return examples;
    }
}

Now I know I could instead do

public class Example
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
}
public class DataGenerator
{
    public IEnumerable<Example> GetExamples(string categoryName)
    {
        //Context Definition
        IEnumerable<Example> examples =
            from x in db.Examples //LINQ to SQL Class,
            where x.Category.Name = categoryName
            select new Example{ Name = x.Name, Description = x.Description };

        return examples;
    }
}

or if I wanted to continue only exposing an interface

public interface IExample
{
    string Name { get; set; }
    string Description { get; set; }
}
internal class Example:IExample
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
}
public class DataGenerator
{
    public IEnumerable<IExample> GetExamples(string categoryName)
    {
        //LINQ to SQL Context Definition
        var examples =
            from x in db.Examples             where x.Category.Name = categoryName
            select new Example{ Name = x.Name                              , Description = x.Description };

        return examples.OfType<IExample>();
    }
}

Over all this isn’t a big issue since the second method works just fine for what I am trying to accomplish for the most part. But it feels kind of off having to make a throwaway class to accomplish this.