(Part 1) What are delegates in c#?

Hello everyone, today we are going to discuss the delegates using c#,we will discuss the syntax, and in the end we will take a look at example to add two numbers using delegates in c#. In the Prerequisites we must have  Visual studio (any version).

What are the delegates in c# (dotnet)?
Delegates are similar to object references, but are used to reference methods instead of objects. The type of a delegate is the type or signature of the method rather than the class. Hence following are the three properties of delegates:

1. The type or signature of the method that the delegate can point to
2. The delegate reference which can be used to reference a method
3. The actual method referenced by the delegate

What are the advantages of delegates?
At Very first advantage of the delegate is that it encapsulate our method so the user of our application is don't know about the inner processing of the application. The other advantages are in the following:

• Effective use of delegate improves the performance of application
• Used to call a method asynchronously

Declaring a delegate:
Declaration of a delegate is in the following:

delegate datatype delegate_name(list of parameters);

delegate: keyword

datatype: type of the delegate which must be same as the type of function to whom the delegate is refering.

list of parameters: all the parameters same as the parameters of the function to whom the delegate is refering.

Example for syntax:

   delegate int myDelegate(int a, int b);

Once we have defined a delegate type, we can set it to reference actual methods with matching signatures. A delegate reference can be declared just like an object reference. For example, a reference of type myDelegate (defined above) can be declared as:

myDelegate arithDelegate;

Now, the delegate reference arithDelegate can reference any method whose signature is identical to the signature of myDelegate.

The delegate reference can be made to reference any method with a matching signature by passing its name as the parameter of delegate:

myDelegate arithDelegate = new myDelegate(function_name);

 For calling our or passing the parameters to our actual function we can do some following stuff.

int r = arithDelegate(list of parameters);

Now, we have done each and every thing for the delegate. So, let's take an example to add two numbers as in the following:

Example: adding two numbers

using System;

namespace cSharpDotNet
{
 
    class Program
    {

        //Declaring our delegate
        delegate int arithMethod(int a, int b);
       
        //Function definition to whom delegate will reference

        private static int add(int a, int b)
        {
            return a + b;
        }
       
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

           //initializing object of our delegate and also referring to the function
            arithMethod obj = new arithMethod(add);

            //Passing parameters to the delegate

            int num = obj(4,5);
            Console.WriteLine("The result of arithmetic operation '+' on 3 and 4 is :{0}", num);
            Console.ReadLine();
           
        }
    }
}

after building solution and debugging the above code this will show the following output on to the black screen.

 That's all from today.

Thank you! ! !