C# Select and Where: Writing SQL-Style Queries in Code
C# is a marvelous language. It’s powerful, fast, and easy to learn. It also exposes advanced features that make doing otherwise difficult things simple. Even more impressively, it manages to make reading the code to do those complicated things easy, too. Many programming languages struggle with this last part. You might be able to do something really cool, but the code is opaque for other developers to read.
One example of a feature where C# makes the difficult easy is in the Language Integrated Natural Query (LINQ) interface. If you’ve been working with a C# code base for a little while, you might have run up against some LINQ code. The first time you see it can feel a little confusing. Some variations of LINQ code look like an entirely different programming language from the C# that you’re used to. Even for variations of LINQ that aren’t entirely different syntax, it can be difficult to parse just what the code you’re looking at is doing.
In this post, we’ll walk through the basics of LINQ and talk about how they work, so the next time you see some LINQ code, it’ll be because you’re writing it yourself.
A good code review can feel like magic. A skilled code reviewer will deftly work through each part of a pull request, noting potential problems and proposing elegant solutions. If you’re like many developers, you recognize a good code review when you see one. You’ve probably even created a few yourself. But you’re probably also a bit unsure as to how to make sure that your code reviews are good every time.
When you’re coding by yourself, for yourself, your code style doesn’t matter that much. Developers the world over have GitHub profiles full of horrible, ugly code they wrote to tinker with some new library or language. Their goal wasn’t to write pretty code, it was to learn something new. That changes when you’re working in a software team, though. Now you need to make sure not only that your code is functional, but that it adheres to team standards.