Calculating frequency distribution of a collection with .Net/C#

Question

Is there a fast/simple way to calculate the frequency distribution of a .Net collection using Linq or otherwise?

For example: An arbitrarily long List contains many repetitions. What's a clever way of walking the list and counting/tracking repetitions?

Answer 1

The easiest way is to use a hashmap and either use the value as the key and increment the value, or pick a bucket size (bucket 1 = 1 - 10, bucket 2 = 11 - 20, etc), and increment each bucket by the value.

Then you can go through and determine the frequencies.