What is Delegate? Explain in brief

Question: What is Delegate? Explain in brief.

Definition of Delegate:

   (Entry 1 of 2): a person empowered to act on behalf of another: as. a : a person who is authorized to perform another's duties under a contract. b : a representative to a convention (as of a political party) or conference.

What is the synonym of delegate?

   Delegate(n) Synonyms: deputy, proxy, vicar, commissioner, legate, envoy, appointee, surrogate

What is Delegate? Explain in brief.

• The Delegate is a function pointer we can say it is like a pointer to a function.
• It is a reference data type and it holds the reference of a function.
• All the delegates are implicity derived from System.Delegate namespace.
• In the .NET environment a delegate is a type that defines a method signature and it can pass a function as a parameter.
• In simple word we can say delegate is a .NET object which points to a method that matches its specific signature.

• A Delegate can be declared using delegate keyword followed by a function signature.

Syntax:

<access_modifier> delegate <return_Type> <delegate_name> (<parameters>)

Example:

Public delegate void delegatemethod(int n1); 

• The delegatemethod delegate show above, can be used to print to any method that has same return type (void) & parameters declared in delegatemethod with int data type.

Example:

1. using System;
2. public delegate void Fprint();
3. namespace Test
4. {
5.           Class program
6.            {
7.                      public Static void hello()
8.                      {
9.                                Console.WriteLine("hello all");
10.                                Console.ReadLine();
11.                      }
12.                      public Static void main()
13.                      {
14.                                 Fprint fp = new Fprint(hello); 
15.                                 fp();
16.                      }
17.             }
18. }