Why to use Delegate:
All of us have been exposed to event driven programming of some sort or the other. A delegate can be seen as a placeholder for a/some method(s) and used to pass methods as arguments to other methods. Event handlers are nothing more than methods that are invoked through delegates. You create a custom method, and a class such as a windows control can call your method when a certain event occurs.

Delegates in c# are type safe objects which are used to hold reference of one or more methods. Delegate represents references to methods with a particular parameter list and return type. When you instantiate a delegate, you can associate its instance with any method with a compatible signature and return type.

An interesting and useful property of a delegate is that it does not know or care about the class of the object that it references. Any object will do; all that matters is that the method’s argument types and return type match the delegate’s. This makes delegates perfectly suited for “anonymous” invocation.

What is the use of Delegates?
Suppose if you have multiple methods with same signature (return type & number of parameters) and want to call all the methods with single object then we can go for delegates.

Delegates are two types
–  Single Cast Delegates
–  Multi Cast Delegates

Single Cast Delegates:
Single cast delegate means which hold address of single method like as explained in above example.

Example:
public delegate int DelegatSample(int a,int b);

public class Sampleclass
{
public int Add(int x, int y)
{
return x + y;
}
public int Sub(int x, int y)
{
return x – y;
}
}
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Sampleclass sc=new Sampleclass();

DelegatSample delgate1 = sc.Add;
int i = delgate1(10, 20);
Console.WriteLine(i);
DelegatSample delgate2 = sc.Sub;
int j = delgate2(20, 10);
Console.WriteLine(j);
}
}

Output:
Add Result : 30
Sub Result : 10

Multicast Delegates:
Multi cast delegate is used to hold address of multiple methods in single delegate. To hold multiple addresses with delegate we will use overloaded += operator and if you want remove addresses from delegate we need to use overloaded operator -=

Multicast delegates will work only for the methods which have return type only void. If we want to create a multicast delegate with return type we will get the return type of last method in the invocation list

Example:
public delegate void MultiDelegate(int a,int b);

public class Sampleclass
{
public static void Add(int x, int y)
{
Console.WriteLine(“Addition Value: “+(x + y));
}
public static void Sub(int x, int y)
{
Console.WriteLine(“Subtraction Value: ” + (x – y));
}
public static void Mul(int x, int y)
{
Console.WriteLine(“Multiply Value: ” + (x * y));
}
}
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Sampleclass sc=new Sampleclass();
MultiDelegate del = Sampleclass.Add;
del += Sampleclass.Sub;
del += Sampleclass.Mul;
del(10, 5);
Console.ReadLine();
}
}

Output
Addition Value : 15
Subtraction Value : 5
Multiply Value : 50

Delegates have the following properties:

1. Delegates are like C++ function pointers but are type safe.
2. Delegates allow methods to be passed as parameters.
3. Delegates can be used to define callback methods.
4. Delegates can be chained together; for example, multiple methods can be called on a single event.
5. C# version 2.0 introduced the concept of Anonymous Methods, which allow code blocks to be passed as parameters in place of a separately defined method. C# Version 3.0 introduced lambda expressions as a more concise way of writing inline code blocks. Both anonymous methods and lambda expressions (in certain contexts) are compiled to delegate types. Together, these features are now known as anonymous functions.

Share this: