Mastering LINQ: Extracting Distinct, Sorted Lists from a DataTable (opens in new tab)

Working with DataTable objects in C# is a daily reality for many .NET developers, but extracting clean, unique, and ordered data often feels more cumbersome than it should be. If you’ve ever found yourself fighting with manual loops or complex nested conditions just to get a list of names, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is your best friend. The Standard Approach To get a distinct, alphabetized list of names from a column in your DataTable, you leverage Enumerable.AsEnumerable() to bridge th...