I will use this first post to remind whoever reads this about a useful method in the System.Linq namespace in .NET. I’m talking about IEnumerable<T>.Any<T>() (and let’s not forget its overload - I will refer to both as Any() throughout this post).
For those who don’t know what that method does (and can’t guess it based on its name), here is what the documentation has to say:
Determines whether a sequence contains any elements.
And for the overload:
Determines whether any element of a sequence satisfies a condition.
For some reason this method is often forgotten (or at least not used when it could have been), which result in code like this:
1 | someSequence.Count() > 0 |
and more like those. I typically see these used as the condition to an if-statement.
If Any() was used instead it would look like this:
1 | someSequence.Any() |
Isn’t that simpler? (Some might like All<T>(..) better for the 4th one. But still..)
By using Any() the code clearly tells the reader that we are only interested in whether the sequence contains any elements (or contains any elements that satisfy a condition). It shows intent.
Any() might also provide a performance increase compared to Count(). Count() is optimized when applied to a collection implementing the ICollection or ICollection<T> interface (in those cases it uses the property Count that is assumed to be faster). But if you have a sequence that do not implement either of those interfaces, Count() will go through each element in the sequence in order to count them. So if you have a very big sequence Count() might take quite a long time to execute, whereas Any() just have to see if there is an element (the overload of Any() that accepts a predicate might have to through all the items - but only if no elements in the sequence satisfy the predicate).
So unless you have a good reason not to use Any() I endorse you to use it.