Roger Jennings writes about issues with finding examples of complex LINQ to XML queries. Boy have I been there and done that. One of the problems with learning LINQ is that you have two options

1) learn LINQ very deeply so you can do what you need

or

2) learn by example

With LINQ, I tend to start with a need, do what I can until I hit a wall, then look for examples that will help me and use them to learn even more. But it means that there needs to be a LOT of examples.

I have often likened learning LINQ as well as learning Entity SQL to learning T-SQL. Learning T-SQL has, for me, been an evolution which has occurred over some ten years. I still have to look up the Cast & Convert topic 99% of the time in the docs whenever I need to convert a datetime to a desired char format.

Even if there were 1001 examples, I know that there will always be something I want to do that I can’t find an example for and will have to rely on gaining a better understanding of LINQ in order to accomplish it.

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