Using a Lambda to Dynamically Create an IComparer

Just recording the following for those lost coding souls like me who are trying to find a solution on the web 🙂

I needed to instantiate a SortedSet for a WinRT application that I am writing. I didn’t want to create a new class that implements an IComparer (just being lazy). I thought that a simple lambda should suffice for the job at hand. After some digging, I found that .NET 4.5 that was just released, offers this capability.

var sorted = new SortedSet<Foo>(Comparer<Foo>.Create((x, y) => x.Bar.CompareTo(y.Bar)));

Hopefully this will help someone!

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about