Historically, the Windows API made frequent use of C-style function pointers to create callback functions. Using a callback, programmers were able to configure one function to report back to another function in the application. So the objective of using a callback is to handle button-clicking, menu-selection, and mouse-moving activities. But the problem with this traditional approach is that the callback functions were not type-safe. In the .NET framework, callbacks are still possible using delegates with a more efficient approach. Delegates maintain three important pieces of information:
- The parameters of the method.
- The address of the method it calls.
- The return type of the method.
A delegate is a solution for situations in which you want to pass methods around to other methods. You are so accustomed to passing data to methods as parameters that the idea of passing methods as an argument instead of data might sound a little strange. However, there are cases in which you have a method that does something, for instance, invoking some other method. You do not know at compile time what this second method is. That information is available only at runtime, hence Delegates are the device to overcome such complications.
