Delegates advantage

Question

I understand what delegates are but unable to understand real advantage of using Delegates? Can someone suggest with example how it's beneficial?

Vulpes · Answer

If we didn't have delegates we'd have no way of passing function pointers to or returning function pointers from methods in a type safe way. This is important if the method needs to 'call back' another method directly or indirectly. If you look at the LINQ extension methods you'll find that most of them take delegates as parameters and since lambda expressions can be automatically converted to compatible delegates this means that you can pass code 'inline' rather than passing an actual method pointer. Also delegates are the underlying mechanism for implementing events in .NET and since you can call several method at once with a single 'multicast' delegate this means that you can make multiple simultaneous notifications when an event occurs which can be handled accordingly.