Introduction

C# provides a rich set of features that allow developers to create robust and maintainable applications. One important feature of C# is its support for delegates, which are a fundamental part of the language's type system. Delegates enable developers to encapsulate methods and pass them as parameters, allowing for flexible and extensible code design.

Imagine you're a software developer working for a financial technology company. Your team is tasked with developing a banking application that handles various operations like transactions and customer management. The application needs to be highly modular and maintainable, with the ability to perform certain tasks dynamically based on user actions or system events. However, you're facing challenges in implementing these dynamic behaviors and ensuring type safety. You also need to make the code more readable and easier to maintain. To address these challenges, you decide to leverage the power of delegates in C#.

The topics covered in this module include:

• Understanding what delegates are and the coding scenarios that use delegates.
• Understanding strongly typed delegates and how they're used in C#.
• Understanding variance in delegates and generics in C#.
• Declaring, instantiating, and invoking delegates in a C# application.

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:

• Explain the concept of delegates in C# and their benefits in terms of flexibility, extensibility, and decoupling.
• Describe how to declare, instantiate, and invoke delegates using various methods, including named methods, anonymous methods, and lambda expressions.
• Explain how delegates are used in sorting, callback, and other real-world scenarios.
• Describe how strongly typed delegates like Action and Func simplify your code and improve readability.
• Explain how variance in C# enhances flexibility in method signatures with delegates.
• Implement delegates in a C# application.