Maybe I’m late to the party, but I just found the Except() LINQ extension method. I knew I loved .NET!

For those of you familiar with set theory, this returns the “difference” between two collections. In my case, I needed to append a set of items to an existing collection, but only if they’re not already in the target collection. This thing was just what I needed.

Here’s the definition:

//
// Summary:
//     Produces the set difference of two sequences by using the default equality
//     comparer to compare values.
//
// Parameters:
//   first:
//     An System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T> whose elements that are not
//     also in second will be returned.
//
//   second:
//     An System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T> whose elements that also occur
//     in the first sequence will cause those elements to be removed from the returned
//     sequence.
//
// Type parameters:
//   TSource:
//     The type of the elements of the input sequences.
//
// Returns:
//     A sequence that contains the set difference of the elements of two sequences.
//
// Exceptions:
//   System.ArgumentNullException:
//     first or second is null.
public static IEnumerable<TSource> Except<TSource>(this IEnumerable<TSource> first, IEnumerable<TSource> second);

Couple this with the ToList() and ForEach() extension method, and you can do this work in about 2 lines of code. Love it!

Cheers!