What is a delegate in C# language?

diakingdev
2 min readJan 1, 2023

What is a delegate in C# language?

In c#, a delegate is a type that represents a reference to a method. It can be used to pass a method as an argument to a delegate. This is useful when you want to call a specific method in response to an event or when you want to pass a method as a parameter to a function.

A delegate is a class that defines a signature for a method, just like a class defines the signature for an event. You can declare a delegate by using the delegate keyword, followed by the return type and the parameters of the method that the delegate will represent. For example:

delegate int DelegateType(int a, int b);    

This declares a delegate type called DelegateType that can be used to reference any method with a return type of int and two parameters of type int.

To use a delegate, you first create an instance of the delegate and assign it to a method with a matching signature. You can then invoke the method through the delegate instance. For example:

DelegateType d = new DelegateType(Add);
int result = d(2, 3); // Invokes the Add method with the arguments 2 and 3

int Add(int a, int b)
{
return a + b;
}

Delegates are often used in events, which allow you to define a list of methods that will be called when an event is raised. For example, you might define an event that is raised when a button is clicked, and you can use delegates to specify which methods should…

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