As I mentioned earlier in this blog post, there is absolutely no difference from a CLR perspective between an anonymous type and an explicitly defined/named type.  Anonymous types and the var keyword are purely "syntactic sugar" that avoid you having to type code - the runtime semantics are the same as using explicitly defined types. 

Among other things, this means that all of the standard .NET type reflection features work with anonymous types - which means that features like databinding to UI controls work just fine with them.  For example, if I wanted to display the results of my previous hierarchical LINQ query, I could define an <asp:gridview> control within a .aspx page like below:

Figure 11

The .aspx above contains a gridview with 2 standard boundfield columns, and one templated field column that contains a nested <asp:bulletedlist> control that I'll use to display the product's hierarchical orderdetail sub-results. 

I could then write the below LINQ code to perform my hierarchical query against the database and databind the custom-shaped results against the GridView to display:

Figure 12

Because the GridView supports binding against any IEnumerable<T> sequence, and uses reflection to retrieve property values, it will work just fine against the anonymous type I'm using above. 

At runtime the above code will produce a simple grid of product details with a hierarchical list of their recent order quantities like so:

Figure 13