Understanding events and event handlers in C#

Question

I understand the purpose of events, especially within the context of creating user interfaces. I think this is the prototype for creating an event:

public vo         


        

Answer 1

Just to add to the existing great answers here - building on the code in the accepted one, which uses a delegate void MyEventHandler(string foo)...

Because the compiler knows the delegate type of the SomethingHappened event, this:

myObj.SomethingHappened += HandleSomethingHappened;

Is totally equivalent to:

myObj.SomethingHappened += new MyEventHandler(HandleSomethingHappened);

And handlers can also be unregistered with -= like this:

// -= removes the handler from the event's list of "listeners":
myObj.SomethingHappened -= HandleSomethingHappened;

For completeness' sake, raising the event can be done like this, only in the class that owns the event:

//Firing the event is done by simply providing the arguments to the event:
var handler = SomethingHappened; // thread-local copy of the event
if (handler != null) // the event is null if there are no listeners!
{
    handler("Hi there!");
}

The thread-local copy of the handler is needed to make sure the invocation is thread-safe - otherwise a thread could go and unregister the last handler for the event immediately after we checked if it was null, and we would have a "fun" NullReferenceException there.

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C# 6 introduced a nice short hand for this pattern. It uses the null propagation operator.

SomethingHappened?.Invoke("Hi there!");