Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

19.2. A Brief Review of the .NET Delegate

Recall that the .NET delegate type is essentially a type-safe, object-oriented, function pointer. When you declare a .NET delegate, the C# compiler responds by building a sealed class that derives from System.MulticastDelegate (which in turn derives from System.Delegate). These base classes provide every delegate with the ability to maintain a list of method addresses, all of which may be invoked at a later time. Consider the BinaryOp delegate first defined in Chapter 11:

// A C# delegate type.
public delegate int BinaryOp(int x, int y);

Based on its definition, BinaryOp can point to any method taking two integers (by value) as arguments and returning an integer. Once compiled, the defining assembly ...