generics - Sorting an IList in C#

Question

So I came across an interesting problem today. We have a WCF web service that returns an IList. Not really a big deal until I wanted to sort it.

Turns out the IList interface doesn't have a sort method built in.

I ended up using the ArrayList.Adapter(list).Sort(new MyComparer()) method to solve the problem but it just seemed a bit "ghetto" to me.

I toyed with writing an extension method, also with inheriting from IList and implementing my own Sort() method as well as casting to a List but none of these seemed overly elegant.

So my question is, does anyone have an elegant solution to sorting an IList

Answer 1

You can use LINQ:

using System.Linq;

IList<Foo> list = new List<Foo>();
IEnumerable<Foo> sortedEnum = list.OrderBy(f=>f.Bar);
IList<Foo> sortedList = sortedEnum.ToList();