C# - Can someone tell me why and where I should use delegates? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Outside of their role in events, which your probably familiar with if you've used winforms or asp.net, delegates are useful for making classes more flexible (e.g. the way they're used in LINQ).

Flexibility for "Finding" things is pretty common. You have a collection of things, and you want to provide a way to find things. Rather than guessing each way that someone might want to find things, you can now allow the caller to provide the algorithm so that they can search your collection however they see fit.

Here's a trivial code sample:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace Delegates
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Collection coll = new Collection(5);
            coll[0] = "This";
            coll[1] = "is";
            coll[2] = "a";
            coll[3] = "test";

            var result = coll.Find(x => x == "is");

            Console.WriteLine(result);

            result = coll.Find(x => x.StartsWith("te"));

            Console.WriteLine(result);

    }

}

public class Collection
{
    string[] _Items;

    public delegate bool FindDelegate(string FindParam);

    public Collection(int Size)
    {
        _Items = new string[Size];

    }

    public string this[int i]
    {
        get { return _Items[i]; }
        set { _Items[i] = value; }
    }

    public string Find(FindDelegate findDelegate)
    {
        foreach (string s in _Items)
        {
            if (findDelegate(s))
                return s;
        }
        return null;
    }

}
}

Output

is

test