A generic list of anonymous class

There are many ways to do this, but some of the responses here are creating a list that contains garbage elements, which requires you to clear the list.

If you are looking for an empty list of the generic type, use a Select against a List of Tuples to make the empty list. No elements will be instantiated.

Here's the one-liner to create an empty list:

 var emptyList = new List<Tuple<int, string>>()
          .Select(t => new { Id = t.Item1, Name = t.Item2 }).ToList();

Then you can add to it using your generic type:

 emptyList.Add(new { Id = 1, Name = "foo" });
 emptyList.Add(new { Id = 2, Name = "bar" });

As an alternative, you can do something like below to create the empty list (But, I prefer the first example because you can use it for a populated collection of Tuples as well) :

 var emptyList = new List<object>()
          .Select(t => new { Id = default(int), Name = default(string) }).ToList();   

Here is the answer.

string result = String.Empty;

var list = new[]
{ 
    new { Number = 10, Name = "Smith" },
    new { Number = 10, Name = "John" } 
}.ToList();

foreach (var item in list)
{
    result += String.Format("Name={0}, Number={1}\n", item.Name, item.Number);
}

MessageBox.Show(result);

You could do:

var list = new[] { o, o1 }.ToList();

There are lots of ways of skinning this cat, but basically they'll all use type inference somewhere - which means you've got to be calling a generic method (possibly as an extension method). Another example might be:

public static List<T> CreateList<T>(params T[] elements)
{
     return new List<T>(elements);
}

var list = CreateList(o, o1);

You get the idea :)