Class design considerations for extension methods and anonymous types

One of my readers was watching the DNRTV episode I did on LINQ recently and had this question: 

At some point, when you're explaining object initializers and anonymous types, you say something regarding extension methods, like how they could be used with the anonymous types. I'm not sure how that'd work: if the anonymous type gets named dynamically as something like "<Projection>F__4", and if the extension is declared during compile time as something like "method (this type)", how can we extend the dynamic class?

He is correct in pointing out the difficulty. These projection or anonymous types have dynamically declared names and when you declare an extension method, you must specify the type after "this" in the argument clause.

One thing that is not obvious is that the type specified after “this” in an extension method doesn't have to be the exact type, but can be an ancestor or interface implemented by the type you are ultimately wishing to extend.

public static float GetArea(this IPolygon shape){...}

As an example, the above extension method could be used as an extension method over anything that implements IPolygon.

The downside is that anonymous types (and linq projections) inherit directly from object and I don't expect that they will implement any special interfaces (the goal is too keep them simple for C# 3.0). What are you left to do? Create extension methods on "object". That is certainly a theoretical option I suppose, but that seems a little bit extreme.

To be honest though, try to think of real cases when you'd want to extend an anonymous type. If the type is truly anonymous, you know absolutely nothing about it, and what assumptions can you really make about it in an extension method? Truly, in some cases, you are going to choose to implement a named type instead of an anonymous type, and it appears that we'll see refactoring support in the tools to promote an anonymous type to a real type. This is a very likely scenario.

The reasonable cases that I can think of where anonymous types are the preference (i.e. I have no burning need to have a named type) but still need (and can) extend them, is when they are used in the context of a collection or another generic type.

For a good example of that, let's take a look at some of the extension methods provided by Linq itself.

  public static class Sequence {

    public static IEnumerable<T> Where<T>(

             this IEnumerable<T> source,

                  Func<T, bool> predicate) {

      foreach (T item in source)

        if (predicate(item))

          yield return item;

    }

  }

Consider that this is an Extension method for anything IEnumerable<T>. In this case, we're using this extension method against an IEnumerable collection of type <T> - a generic. That generic type could be an anonymous type. But the important information here is that we know something more about the anonymous type here and that is that it's used inside of an Enumerable collection, and hence we can provide the value of iterating through it in the foreach, evaluating some criteria, and yielding the items that pass the criteria into another collection.