🚀 Pro Tip: Leverage IEnumerable for Deferred Execution

📌 Highlights:
❌ Immediate Execution: List forces execution of all items, even if you don't need them all at once.
✅ Deferred Execution: IEnumerable allows for efficient, on-demand processing, improving performance for large datasets by delaying execution until iteration.

Comments

[Wayne Douglas]

It's the .ToList that causes the execution?

[DotNet Full Stack Dev]

@wayneo Correct! .ToList() causes differed execution.
The .ToList() method is often used to trigger immediate execution of a LINQ query. Without .ToList(), a LINQ query with deferred execution won't run until the results are needed. However, when you call .ToList(), the query is immediately executed, and the results are materialized into a List. After this point, the query is no longer deferred, and the data is stored in memory for further use.

Similarly, we have other ways of eager and lazy loading in EF with LINQ, that you can explore here.

Eager Loading, Lazy Loading, and Explicit Loading in Entity Framework