Microsoft® .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting

Asynchronous Delegates

One of the basic building blocks in .NET is the delegate. Delegates are often described as type-safe function pointers. They are function pointers because they enable you to store a reference that "points" to a class method. They are type-safe because every delegate is defined with a fixed method signature. For example, you might create a delegate variable that can point to any method that takes two string parameters and returns an integer value. This is the delegate signature. You can’t use this delegate to store a reference to a method with a different signature (for example, one that takes two string parameters and has no return value).

The two core delegate classes are as follows:

• System.Delegate

  The base delegate type, ...