**CORRECTED 8/26/08: Apparently my initial code did not work correctly.  This appears to be a widespread mistake, as I found about a dozen other people doing the exact thing I was doing with reference types.  Corrected code and the non-working example are below.**

I am tired of writing array initialization code that looks like this:

   1: TermVector[] vectors = new TermVector[6];

   2: for (int i = 0; i < vectors.Length; i++)

   3: {

   4:     vectors[i] = new TermVector();

   5: }

I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a better way to handle this.  It turns out that there is: just use LINQ! Here’s my first try (and the way most forum and blog posts recommend to do it):

   1: TermVector[] vectors = Enumerable.Repeat(new TermVector(), 6).ToArray();

Whoa, that’s easy.  But there’s a problem!  If you check the contents of the array, you’ll notice that it is populated with 6 references to the exact same instance of TermVector!  That’s not what I wanted.  That’s not what I wanted at all!  Let’s try again:

   1: TermVector[] vectors = Enumerable.Repeat(0, 6).Select(i => new TermVector()).ToArray();

If you inspect the array, you’ll see that you now have references to 6 different instances instead of 6 references to the same instance.  Sweet!