I am using the below statement with the intent of getting all of the machine objects from the MachineList collection (type IEnumerable) that have a MachineStatus of i. The MachineList collection will not always contain machines with a status of i.

At times when no machines have a MachineStatus of i I'd like to return an empty collection. My call to ActiveMachines (which is used first) works but InactiveMachines does not.

public IEnumerable<Machine> ActiveMachines
{
    get
    {
        return Customer.MachineList
            .Where(m => m.MachineStatus == "a");
    }
}

public IEnumerable<Machine> InactiveMachines
{
    get
    {
        return Customer.MachineList
            .Where(m => m.MachineStatus == "i");
    }
}

Edit

Upon further examination it appears that any enumeration of MachineList will cause subsequent enumerations of MachineList to throw an exeception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Therefore, it doesn't matter if a call is made to ActiveMachines or InactiveMachines as its an issue with the MachineList collection. This is especially troubling because I can break calls to MachineList simply by enumerating it in a Watch before it is called in code. At its lowest level MachineList implements NHibernate.IQuery being returned as an IEnumerable. What's causing MachineList to lose its contents after an initial enumeration?