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>Can I ask you about the use of the Var type there? I know that was a new feature in C# 3.0 but thought it was for occasions when the type is unknown at compile time. Given your expertise I am sure there is a good reason.

No, it's just a shortcut to tell the compiler to infer the type based on the method you are calling. It's still strongly-typed and known at compile time. One of the things I thought was really dumb when I started using .NET was how redundant statements like this were:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

You mean the variable is a StringBuilder - nah, no kidding?! Apparently other people thought this was silly as well and they gave us var - the compiler infers the type based on the type being created or returned by a method. OK, so they didn't give it to us for that reason, it was needed for anonymous types. But it's still a welcome addition.

This is equivalent:

var sb = new StringBuilder();

If you don't know the type at compile time then you would use the new "dynamic" type.