As discussed in earlier installments of this article series–most notably in, An Introduction to LINQ and The Standard Query Operators–one of LINQ’s primary components is its set of standard query operators. A query operator is a method that operates on a sequence of data and performs some task based on that data, are implemented as extension methods on types that implement the IEnumerable<T> interface. Some of the standard query operators that we’ve explored throughout the articles in this series include: Count, Average, First, Skip, Take, Where, and OrderBy, among others.
While these standard query operators provide a great detail of functionality, there may be situations where they fall short. The good news is that it’s quite easy to create your own query operators. Underneath the covers, query operators are just methods that extend types that implement IEnumerable<T> and iterate over the sequence performing some task, such as computing the total number of items in the sequence, computing the average, filtering the results, or ordering them. This article examines how to extend LINQ’s functionality by creating your own extension methods. Read the full article, An Extensive Examination of LINQ: Extending LINQ – Adding Query Operators.