Question

About half of the examples I see for Linq queries using the Any method do so by applying it to the results of a Where() call, the other half apply it directly to the collection. Are the two styles always equivalent, or are there cases wheres that they could return different results?

My testing supports the former conclusion; but edge cases aren’t always easy to find.

List<MyClass> stuff = GetStuff();
bool found1 = stuff.Where(m => m.parameter == 1).Any();
bool found2 = stuff.Any(m => m.parameter == 1);

Answer 1

It comes down to 2 important questions:

• is it a standard “Where”/”Any” (such as Enumerable.* or Queryable.*), or is it custom? (if the latter, all bets are off)
• if it is Queryable.*, what is the provider?

The latter matters hugely. For example, LINQ-to-SQL and LINQ-to-EF behave differently re Single, so I would not assume that they behave identically for Any. A more esoteric provider could do anything. But more: LINQ-to-SQL does different things (re the identity-manager) for Single(predicate) vs Where(predicate).Single (and for First too). In fact, there are 3 different behaviours available in LINQ-to-SQL there depending on 3.5, 3.5SP1, or 4.0.

Additionally, IIRC LINQ-to-ADO.NET-Data-Services had different (opposite, from memory) support to EF – so (again from memory) while one provider only supported Single(predicate), the other only supported Where(predicate).Single(); it is not a great leap to suggest that Any() could be similarly affected by different providers.

So: while Any(predicate) and Where(predicate).Any() are semantically equivalent – it is impossible to say if they are actually the same without very detailed information to the context.