melbolt

hi there,

I feel like i've been making some good progress with my learning in .NET programming, however i'm kind of stumped on when and how to use delegates and custom events in my programming. I've read several tutorials but it's still fuzzy to me, i was just wondering if anyone can give me a basic overview of when these might be used, what exactly they are used for, and what the differences between the two are.

any feedback is greatly appreciated.

this has been a brick wall in my understanding of programming concepts,

thanks

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Dameon

I'll try to break it down.

1. An event is more or less a list of delegates. When you raise an event, all the event handlers (which are delegates) are invoked.

2. A delegate is like a function prototype. In the case of events, it specifies what parameters the event handlers take.

An example is if you had an AlarmClock class, which happens to be an example in the MSDN.

3. Your alarm clock would have an Alarm event, an AlarmEventHandler delegate, and an AlarmEventArgs class, following the typical .Net pattern (though you don't have to).

4. The Alarm class has an OnAlarm method that allows subclasses to both raise (subclasses can't call the event directly) and handle (overriding is cleaner than an event) the Alarm event. Note that AlarmEventHandler says that any handlers have to have a sender parameter (a reference to who raised the event, since a single handler often serves many objects) and a paramter of type AlarmEventArgs (derived from EventArgs and containing data specific to an Alarm event).

When you want to add a handler on the alarm:

When the Alarm needs to go off (called from inside Alarm)

Inside OnAlarm:

Your Handler called myHandler (Which matches the AlarmEventHandler delegate):

Now, take a look at the examples for events provided by MSDN and see if you can understand what's going on. Then, create a project with a form (A Windows Application in Visual Studio), and see what the form designer adds when you tell it to add an event handler.

If you have specific questions, seeing how broad Events are, please elaborate.

As for when to use them: Whenever an event occurs (surprised?) that one or more parts of your code needs to be made aware of, but the originator of the event doesn't know who wants to know about it. Look at a Button control. Does the button know what parts of your code to call when it is clicked? No. A perfect canidate for an event, which is why there is a Click event on a Button.

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