Paul Kimmel

Finding a beginning is always a little subjective in computer books. This is because so many things depend on so many other things. Often, the best we can do is put a stake in the ground and start from that point. Anonymous types are our stake. Anonymous types use the keyword var. Var is an interesting choice because it is still used in Pascal and Delphi today, but var in Delphi is like ByRef in Visual Basic (VB) or ref in C#. The var introduced with .NET 3.5 indicates an anonymous type. Now, our VB friends are going to think, "Well, we have had variants for years; big deal." But var is not a dumbing down and clogging up of C#. Anonymous types are something new and necessary. Before looking at anonymous types, let's put a target on our end goal. Our end goal is to master LINQ (integrated queries) in C# for objects, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and data. We want... (more)