Method syntax

The LINQ queries you’ve seen and written so far use QUERY SYNTAX, which expresses your query as a series of clauses (from, where, etc.) in a statement. LINQ also provides another way of expressing queries, called METHOD SYNTAX, which, as you might expect, expresses the query using method calls rather than statements.

Instead of expressing a query as a statement:

You can express it as a method call:

Query syntax is the recommended format (does anybody actually enjoy writing lambdas?), but some LINQ methods, like Count() and Average(), can only be expressed using method syntax. Fortunately, you can mix query and method syntax if you wrap the portion of the query that’s written as a statement in parentheses: