According to FeedBurner the count of my blog subscribers has been steadily decreasing the last couple of weeks. I can’t blame those quitters because my posts have been few and far between. But for those of you beautiful and intelligent people with enough patience to wait for something worthwhile - you’re in luck today.
Several days ago I was working with a LINQ to SQL statement where I wanted to get an item if it’s name existed in a string array of passed in values. I needed a LINQ translation for the SQL ” where in (value1, value2, … , valueN)” syntax. Intellisense provided little value. I had to turn to Google for answers. Do you realize how difficult it is to search for the keyword “in” on Google?!? It was nightmare. I think I got lucky when I tried “where in value”. I found this post from Dan Wahlin that provided an example of exactly what I was trying to do:
The solution is actually rather simple if you look at it from a programming perspective, but I have a tough time remembering that LINQ is not a SQL syntax, but is instead a first class part of the framework/language that is used for querying. Below is the example that Dan provided in his post:
public static Product\[\] GetProducts(Guid\[\] prodIDs)
{
return GetProducts().Where(p => prodIDs.Contains(p.ProductID)).ToArray<Product>();
}Just like you can say “if (myobj == null)” and it means the same thing as “if (null == myobj)” the LINQ syntax is a bit clearer if you think about reversing the order of the equality. So instead of thinking about it as “if my object is in this bucket” think of it instead as “if this bucket contains my object”. After seeing this it made sense to me. And LINQ and I became closer, maybe even friends.