Shuffle a List<T> in C# .NET 7 with one line

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There will be a time in your programming career that you will need to shuffle a list of objects/primitives. This can be done easily using LINQ’s OrderBy() and Random.Next().

Let’s see the algorithm step by step:

1. We declare the list.

// Declaration of list
List<int> listOfInt = new() {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

2. We call Random.Shared.Next() which returns a random integer. We then pass this random integer as a parameter to OrderBy().
OrderBy() orders a list in ascending order according to a key.
Giving it our random integer as a key will make the list items to be ordered randomly. We call ToList() to get a new List<int> from it and save the result back to our list.

listOfInt = listOfInt.OrderBy(x=> Random.Shared.Next()).ToList();

3. We finally foreach the list and print our items.

foreach (int item in listOfInt)
{
   Console.WriteLine(item);
}

/* Will output something like
3
2
5
4
1
*/

Here is the full code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

List<int> listOfInt = new() {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

listOfInt = listOfInt.OrderBy(x=> Random.Shared.Next()).ToList();

foreach (int item in listOfInt)
{
   Console.WriteLine(item);
}

/* Will output something like
3
2
5
4
1
*/

That’s it! You now know how to shuffle a List of objects/primitives in C# .NET7.

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