Advantages of using delegates?

Question

I\'m looking to implement the Observer pattern in VB.NET or C# or some other first-class .NET language. I\'ve heard that delegates can be used for this, but can\'t figure ou

Answer 1

I've heard some "events evangelists" talk about this and they say that as more decoupled events are, the better it is.

Preferably, the event source should never know about the event listeners and the event listener should never care about who originated the event. This is not how things are today because in the event listener you normally receive the source object of the event.

With this said, delegates are the perfect tool for this job. They allow decoupling between event source and event observer because the event source doesn't need to keep a list of all observer objects. It only keeps a list of "function pointers" (delegates) of the observers. Because of this, I think this is a great advantage over Interfaces.