Why are delegates used if everytime I
declare a delegate, it needs a method
to point to? and if it needs a method
to point to, why not just call that
method directly?
Like interfaces, delegates let you decouple and generalize your code. You usually use delegates when you don't know in advance which methods you will want to execute - when you only know that you'll want to execute something that matches a certain signature.
For example, consider a timer class that will execute some method at regular intervals:
public delegate void SimpleAction();
public class Timer {
public Timer(int secondsBetweenActions, SimpleAction simpleAction) {}
}
You can plug anything into that timer, so you can use it in any other project or applications without trying to predict how you'll use it and without limiting its use to a small handful of scenarios that you're thinking of right now.
