Function pointers in C#

Question

I suppose in some ways either (or both) Delegate or MethodInfo qualify for this title. However, neither provide the syntactic niceness that I\'m lo

Answer 1

Here's another bit of code you could use; Reflection is rather slow, so if you expect your Dynamic function calls to be called frequently, you don't want method.Invoke inside the delegate:

public delegate void DynamicAction(params object[] parameters);
static class DynamicActionBuilder
{
    public static void PerformAction0(Action a, object[] pars) { a(); }
    public static void PerformAction1(Action a, object[] p) {
        a((T1)p[0]);
    }
    public static void PerformAction2(Action a, object[] p) {
        a((T1)p[0], (T2)p[1]);
    }
    //etc...

    public static DynamicAction MakeAction(object target, MethodInfo mi) {
        Type[] typeArgs =
            mi.GetParameters().Select(pi => pi.ParameterType).ToArray();
        string perfActName = "PerformAction" + typeArgs.Length;
        MethodInfo performAction =
            typeof(DynamicActionBuilder).GetMethod(perfActName);
        if (typeArgs.Length != 0)
            performAction = performAction.MakeGenericMethod(typeArgs);
        Type actionType = performAction.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType;
        Delegate action = Delegate.CreateDelegate(actionType, target, mi);
        return (DynamicAction)Delegate.CreateDelegate(
            typeof(DynamicAction), action, performAction);
    }
}

And you could use it like this:

static class TestDab
{
    public static void PrintTwo(int a, int b) {
        Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", a, b);
        Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}", a, b));//for immediate window.
    }
    public static void PrintHelloWorld() {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        Trace.WriteLine("Hello World!");//for immediate window.
    }

    public static void TestIt() {
        var dynFunc = DynamicActionBuilder.MakeAction(null,
            typeof(TestDab).GetMethod("PrintTwo"));
        dynFunc(3, 4);
        var dynFunc2 = DynamicActionBuilder.MakeAction(null,
            typeof(TestDab).GetMethod("PrintHelloWorld"));
        dynFunc2("extraneous","params","allowed"); //you may want to check this.
    }
}

This will be quite a bit faster; each dynamic call will involve 1 typecheck per param, 2 delegate calls, and one array construction due to the params-style passing.