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Delegate: A Person Sent or Authorized To Represent Others, in Particular An Elected. Representative Sent To A Conference

Delegates allow methods to be passed as parameters and invoked remotely. A delegate acts as a representative for a method. When an event occurs that matches a delegate, any methods associated with that delegate through an event are invoked. In the example, a House class has a static FireAlarm event to notify others when the house burns. A Fireman and Doctor subscribe to the event using delegates. When the house burns, the FireAlarm is raised, invoking the Fireman and Doctor's delegate methods to handle the fire.

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72 views6 pages

Delegate: A Person Sent or Authorized To Represent Others, in Particular An Elected. Representative Sent To A Conference

Delegates allow methods to be passed as parameters and invoked remotely. A delegate acts as a representative for a method. When an event occurs that matches a delegate, any methods associated with that delegate through an event are invoked. In the example, a House class has a static FireAlarm event to notify others when the house burns. A Fireman and Doctor subscribe to the event using delegates. When the house burns, the FireAlarm is raised, invoking the Fireman and Doctor's delegate methods to handle the fire.

Uploaded by

agupta3304
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Today Im talking about events & delegates,

that unknown partner for a lot of you.


Google English Dictionary explains the meaning of
delegate:
Delegate: a person sent or authorized to represent others,
in particular an elected. Representative sent to a
conference.
I want to single out "sent or authorized to represent
others".
So a delegate in C# programming is an entity authorized
to represent others and it can be sent for this purpose. This
means that we have something that needs to be
represented.
What is it? Well in our case, it is a Method (Function).
The method resides somewhere. It may belong to an
object or it maybe just a static method. If the method
needs to have a remote representation, it uses a delegate.
The delegate can be sent someplace far from the
represented method but if need be, the delegate can easily
invoke the method no matter how far apart they are. So
why was the entity called delegate introduced? It was
mainly done to be able to invoke any method remotely. It
also allows us to somehow pass the method as a
parameter.
.
Basic usage
A basic usage of event & delegates should look like this:
//Delegate declaration
public delegate void CallBack();
//CallBack event declaration
public event CallBack MyEvent;
private void RaiseMyEvent()
{
if (MyEvent != null)
MyEvent();
}
Delegates are descriptions (like prototypes in C) about
how a method looks like, and we can use those
descriptions as variables in order to have dynamic
methods inside our classes. That means that we dont
know who implement it, instead of that, the
implementation is given by someone that will say I am
who implement this method.
Some Theory
By default, delegates in C# are multicast, that means that
more than one method can say I am who implement this
method and all of them will do the work at the same
time, so in order to give this a little sense there exists
events which give the semantical meaning to a delegate,
while a delegate is a method, an event is something that
will be launched when something happens or determinate
conditions have been accomplished in our class
Note in the code above that we also made a method
declaration
private void RaiseMyEvent()
Thats because we cant call a dynamic method that
have not been set, so we will need to check if that
description have been provided by someone, I highly
recommend you to use the code above as the minimum
code needed for an event/delegate declaration
The example
I created an example so you can see what happens when
we do get this to a real example :). Imagine a House
that gets on fire and there exist a Fireman and a Doctor
that care about it.
Here is the House implementation, It has a fire alarm for
when its on fire
public class House
{
//Delegate declaration
public delegate void
FireAlarmDelegate();
//FireAlarm event declaration
public static event
FireAlarmDelegate FireAlarm;
private static void
RaiseFireAlarm()
{
if (FireAlarm != null)
FireAlarm();
}
public static void Burn()
{
Debug.WriteLine("Burn!!");
RaiseFireAlarm();
}
}
Here is the Fireman, it cares about when the fire alarm
rises up and do what is needed in that case.
public class Fireman
{
public Fireman()
{
// I am the FIREMAN and I want
to be
// notified when the house is
on fire.
House.FireAlarm += HouseIsOnFire;
}
private void HouseIsOnFire()
{
Debug.WriteLine("I am the
FIREMAN");
}
}
Here is the Doctor, and it also cares about when the fire
alarm rises up and do what is needed in that case.
public class Doctor
{
public Doctor()
{
// I am the DOCTOR and I want
to be
// notified when the house is
on fire.
House.FireAlarm +=
HouseIsOnFire;
}
private void HouseIsOnFire()
{
Debug.WriteLine("I am the
DOCTOR");
}
}
When we create the fireman he start taking care about the
house fire alarm (the same with the doctor), so when we
burn the house, they will do what is needed in their
respective methods.
If we get this into practice:
Fireman fireman = new Fireman();
Doctor doctor = new Doctor();
House.Burn();
The result looks like this:
- Burn!!
- I am the FIREMAN
- I am the DOCTOR

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