Thursday 19 February 2009

6 Ways to Instantiate Delegates in C#

A delegate is a reference to a method.

It's sometimes confusing how to instantiate a delegate, so I thought to write this.

There are 6 ways to instantiate a delegate as the following example shows:

Example:

    delegate int MyDelegate(int a,int b);
    public void MyMethod()
    {
      // simply just assign the method name
      MyDelegate myDelegate1 = Add;          

      // instantiate the delegate and pass the method name
      MyDelegate myDelegate2 = new MyDelegate(Add);

      // assign an anonymous method (C# 2.0)
      MyDelegate myDelegate3 = delegate(int a, int b) { return a + b; };

      // assign a lambda expression - format 1 (C# 3.0) 
      MyDelegate myDelegate4 = (int a,int b) => { return a + b;};

      // assign a lambda expression - format 2 (C# 3.0) 
      MyDelegate myDelegate5 = (a,b) => { return a + b; };

      // assign a lambda expression - format 3 (C# 3.0) 
      MyDelegate myDelegate6 = (a, b) => a + b;
    }
    public int Add(int a, int b)
    {
      return a + b;
    }

Notes:
Once you have the delegate instance, you can
  • Run it e.g. myDelegate1(2, 3);
  • Pass the delegate instance to a method
  • Return a delegate instance from a method
More info:

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