LINQ: How to build complex queries utilizing deferred execution and anonymous types

While working with LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities (Entitiy Framework), I really appreciate and utilize the deferred execution capabilities, i.e. the queries are not materialized (sent to server) until they are needed. This great feature can help us to construct our query in several steps and then send a single optimized TSQL version to the database for processing. This approach is similar to our application of CTE (Common Table Expressions) in T-SQL, with which we can build our T-SQL queries in small manageable steps and then finally run a single optimized query on the database. This post will present some scenarios to show how we can utilize the deferred execution capabilities and anonymous types to build complex queries in LINQ.

• Filtering a single table with multiple (and optional) where conditions
• Filtering result of joining several tables with multiple (and optional) where conditions
• Grouping with filtered aggregations