Casting lists using LINQ #2

In my previous post I showed the LINQ way to cast List<SomeDeriveType> to List<SomeBaseObject>.

IEnumerable<BaseObject> baseObjects    
             = DerivedList.Cast<BaseObject>;

Great stuff!

As @jamiei commented this will raise an exception if the cast fails. OfType<T> will return only the elements of type T despite the fact that you have different derived types in one list. So suppose you have an Animal class and a Cat and Dog class that derive from Animal you could do something like this:

List<Animal> animalList = new List<Animal>();
animalList.Add(new Dog("Dog1"));
animalList.Add(new Dog("Dog2"));
animalList.Add(new Dog("Dog3"));
animalList.Add(new Cat("Cat1"));
animalList.Add(new Cat("Cat2"));
animalList.Add(new Cat("Cat3"));
//Get the dogs
IEnumerable<Dog> dogList = animalList.OfType<Dog>();
//Get the cats
IEnumerable<Cat> catList = animalList.OfType<Cat>();

LINQ makes it very easy to seperate the Dogs from the Cats!