A different take on FirstOrDefault

Question

The IEnumerable extension method FirstOrDefault didn\'t exactly do as I wanted so I created FirstOrValue. Is this a good way to go about this or is there a better way?

Answer 1

Seems reasonable to me if you want to tweak the readability instead of using DefaultIfEmpty.

You could also create an override that uses a lambda if the creation of the default value is expensive, creating it only if necessary.

public static T FirstOrValue(this IEnumerable source, Func predicate, Func getValue)
{
    T first = source.FirstOrDefault(predicate);
    return Equals(first, default(T)) ? getValue() : first;
}