ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Understanding Anonymous Types

Anonymous types is another idea that might be familiar to you from dynamic languages. Anonymous types are useful when you need a transient, fleeting type and you don’t want to do the work to create a class.

Here’s an example of creating an anonymous type in C#:

var customer = new {FirstName = "Stephen", LastName = "Walther"};

Here’s how you would create the same anonymous type in VB.NET:

Dim customer = New With {.FirstName = "Stephen", .LastName = "Walther"}

The customer variable is used without specifying a type, which looks very much like JavaScript or VBScript. However, you need to understand that customer does have a type; you just don’t know its name: It’s anonymous.

In a single line of code, we’ve managed to ...