" MSDN
Anonymous Types (C# Programming Guide)
Updated: July 2008
Anonymous types provide a convenient way to encapsulate a set of
read-only properties into a single object without having to first
explicitly define a type. The type name is generated by the compiler
and is not available at the source code level. The type of the
properties is inferred by the compiler. The following example shows
an anonymous type being initialized with two properties called
Amount and Message.
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var v = new { Amount = 108, Message = "Hello" };
Anonymous types are typically used in the select clause of a query
expression to return a subset of the properties from each object in
the source sequence. For more information about queries, see
LINQ Query Expressions (C# Programming Guide).
Anonymous types are created by using the new operator with an object
initializer. For more information about object initializers, see
Object and Collection Initializers (C# Programming Guide).
Anonymous types are class types that consist of one or more public
read-only properties. No other kinds of class members such as
methods or events are allowed. An anonymous type cannot be cast to
any interface or type except for object.
The most common scenario is to initialize an anonymous type with
some properties from another type. In the following example, assume
a class that is named Product that includes Color and Price
properties together with several other properties that you are not
interested in. Products is a collection of Product objects. The
anonymous type declaration starts with the new keyword. It
initializes a new type that uses only two properties from Product.
This causes a smaller amount of data to be returned in the query.
If you do not specify member names in the anonymous type, the
compiler gives the anonymous type members the same name as the
property being used to initialize them. You must provide a name to a
property that is being initialized with an expression.
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var productQuery = from prod in products select new { prod.Color,
prod.Price };
foreach (var v in productQuery)
{
Console.WriteLine("Color={0}, Price={1}", v.Color, v.Price);
}
When an anonymous type is assigned to a variable, that variable must
be initialized with the var construct. This is because only the
compiler has access to the underlying name of the anonymous type.
For more information about var, see
Implicitly
Typed Local Variables (C# Programming Guide).
Remarks
Anonymous types are reference types that derive directly from
object. The compiler gives them a name although your application
cannot access it. From the perspective of the common language
runtime, an anonymous type is no different from any other reference
type, except that it cannot be cast to any type except for object.
If two or more anonymous types have the same number and type of
properties in the same order, the compiler treats them as the same
type and they share the same compiler-generated type information.
An anonymous type has method scope. To pass an anonymous type, or a
collection that contains anonymous types, outside a method boundary,
you must first cast the type to object. However, this defeats the
strong typing of the anonymous type. If you must store your query
results or pass them outside the method boundary, consider using an
ordinary named struct or class instead of an anonymous type.
Anonymous types cannot contain unsafe types as properties.
Because the Equals and GetHashCode methods on anonymous types are
defined in terms of the Equals and GetHashcode of the properties,
two instances of the same anonymous type are equal only if all their
properties are equal.