Generic Lists and LINQ

When LINQ was introduced I was pretty uninterested. I thought to myself, "what's the point?" Well, after using it I think it's an invaluable part of the .NET Framework.

Ever since our team was given the go to update our environment to VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, I've been including LINQ in my current project. Granted I'm only using LINQ to objects, but I see myself using LINQ to XML when I come to that point.

I use Generic Lists all over the place in my project. Today I ran across something I found interesting while I was doing something that required copying of a List. Copying List contents to another List without LINQ is pretty simple.

Dim CopyList As New List(Of Object)

CopyList.AddRange(OriginalList)

Now with LINQ, you can use the ToList extension method and you don't have to create a New CopyList up front.

Dim CopyList As List(Of Object)

CopyList = OriginalList.ToList

Also, from my testing (admittedly light and crude) the ToList extension method is faster at completing the copy.