Real World Example for Anonymous Types of C# .NET

Question

I am learning Anonymous Type in C#, I have understood how they are defined and used. Below is a sample code I have tried for Anonymous Type.

var myType = new {
Name = "Yasser",
City = "Mumbai"
};
Console.WriteLine("Name: {0}, Type: {1}", myType.Name, myType.City);

My Question

Where in real world scenario, will these be used ? Can anyone give me an example or scenario where these Anonymous Type could be used.

Answer 1

LINQ queries use them a lot:

var productQuery = 
    from prod in products
    select new { prod.Color, prod.Price };

The { prod.Color, prod.Price } is an anonymous type that has a read-only Color and Price property. If you would iterate through the results of that query you could use that type as any other class:

foreach (var v in productQuery)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Color={0}, Price={1}", v.Color, v.Price);
}

In other words, you didn't have to define a new class that would look something like this:

public class ColoredPricedItem
{
    public Color {get;}
    public Price {get;}
}

Even more, Color and Price types are correctly inferred from your query.