.NET Answers

Archive for December 4th, 2008

I received the following question:

What is a delegate?  What problem does it solve?  and When might I use a delegate?

A delegate is essentially a function pointer.  We have used function pointers in various scenarios in the past to solve the problem of needing to execute user-defined code inside of another function or to fire events using the observed/observable programming pattern.

The problem we’ve always had with function pointers in the past is that there has never been any type safety.  If I had a variable that was supposed to point to a function, I could assign it any function.  So if the function the code is expecting returns a string and takes an integer and a string as parameters, I could assign the variable a function that returned nothing (void) and passed nothing.  My code would compile, but when I got to that function, the chances are my code would blow up on me.

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