Question

Below method selects admin rights and returns bool from a cached DataTable, would it perform better with Linq?

You might ask why don’t you test it. Well,due to lack of knowledge i can’t write it in Linq

 DataRow[] result = PrivilegeMap.Select("privilegeActionId=" + (int)actionId);
            bool moderatorHasIt = Convert.ToBoolean(result[0]["moderatorHasIt"]);
            bool adminHasIt = Convert.ToBoolean(result[0]["adminHasIt"]);                                        
            if (myRole == User.Role.Admin)
            {
                return Convert.ToBoolean(adminHasIt);
            }
            if (myRole == User.Role.Moderator)
            {
                return Convert.ToBoolean(moderatorHasIt);
            }
            else
            {
                return false;
            }

Answer 1

It probably would be faster using LINQ because the datatable wouldn’t have to parse your query string, but you’ll get the greatest advantage by changing the data representation to avoid querying against a datatable in the first place.

Create an IDictionary<int, bool> that represents the privileges you’re interested in, keyed by actionId. Then when you need to do a lookup, you can just return dict[actionId.

Regardless, I suspect this is probably a case of Premature Optimization: have you tested your program and found that this piece of code represents a significant portion of your processing time?