Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

A Trip Down Memory Lane with C++ Function Pointers

C++ programmers have been implementing callbacks in their applications since long before the advent of the .NET Framework. In C++, a callback is often implemented not with the use of an interface, but rather with a function pointer. While you don't need to know the low-level details of how to program using function pointers, it's valuable for you to understand them at a higher level because of their influence on the architecture of the .NET Framework.

A function pointer is the memory address of a method implementation. At the assembly language level, it points to a set of instructions that represent the executable logic for a method. To use a function pointer, one part of the application must ...