Joining two lists together

The Union method might address your needs. You didn't specify whether order or duplicates was important.

Take two IEnumerables and perform a union as seen here:

int[] ints1 = { 5, 3, 9, 7, 5, 9, 3, 7 };
int[] ints2 = { 8, 3, 6, 4, 4, 9, 1, 0 };

IEnumerable<int> union = ints1.Union(ints2);

// yields { 5, 3, 9, 7, 8, 6, 4, 1, 0 } 

Something like this:

firstList.AddRange (secondList);

Or, you can use the 'Union' extension method that is defined in System.Linq. With 'Union', you can also specify a comparer, which can be used to specify whether an item should be unioned or not.

Like this:

List<int> one = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
List<int> second=new List<int> { 1, 2, 5, 6 };

var result = one.Union (second, new EqComparer ());

foreach( int x in result )
{
    Console.WriteLine (x);
}
Console.ReadLine ();

#region IEqualityComparer<int> Members
public class EqComparer : IEqualityComparer<int>
{
    public bool Equals( int x, int y )
    {
        return x == y;
    }

    public int GetHashCode( int obj )
    {
        return obj.GetHashCode ();
    }
}
#endregion

You could try:

List<string> a = new List<string>();
List<string> b = new List<string>();

a.AddRange(b);

MSDN page for AddRange

This preserves the order of the lists, but it doesn't remove any duplicates which Union would do.

This does change list a. If you wanted to preserve the original lists then you should use Concat (as pointed out in the other answers):

var newList = a.Concat(b);

This returns an IEnumerable as long as a is not null.

The way with the least space overhead is to use the Concat extension method.

var combined = list1.Concat(list2);

It creates an instance of IEnumerable<T> which will enumerate the elements of list1 and list2 in that order.