Custom LINQ orderby expression

LINQ expressions are so slick that I don't know how I lived without them for so long. I had a little issue with a custom orderby, however, and found a pretty neat solution.

Here's the objects:


Festival{ String FestivalName, IEnumerable Events ...}
Event { String Type, DateTime Date ...}


A festival has many different Events: Start, Finish, Performances, etc. I want a list of festivals in order according to the start date. I was going to expose a specific property in Festival that returned the date of the Start event if it existed, but I wanted to generalize it. I knew about FirstOrDefault and came up with the following:


List Festival=
(from d in FestivalList
orderby s.Events.FirstOrDefault(q => q.Type=="Start").Date
select d)


I ended up getting a NullReferenceException because not all festivals were properly entered and some didn't have Start events. I decided that these should show up first. So I had to use a different approach with the orderby by using another inline LINQ query.


List Festival=
(from d in FestivalList
orderby
(from e in s.Events
where e.Type == "Start"
select e
).DefaultIfEmpty(new Event()).First().Date
select d)


The DefaultIfEmpty specifies how we should handle when there isn't an Event. In this case, I'm returning an empty event which will return DateTime.MinValue (This is part of the Event.Date definition). Slicker than snot.