Before we can start delving into LINQ, we need to first understand the underlying principles upon which it is built. LINQ is all about operations over collections, so, you’ve guessed it: we will be dealing with collections.
You already learned that of all data structures, arrays are the fastest, because they are unsorted non-generic data structures.… Read more
Sometimes, programmers find themselves in need of adding new functionality to already existing codes, in order to improve or complete them. If the said source code is available, the task is simple – they only need to add the required functionality and recompile.… Read more
Let’s talk about something that you should not encounter in your day to day programming experience, but nevertheless, you should be aware of, if you want to become a professional engineer: covariance and contravariance with delegates. They are general programming terms, so, you will encounter them in other programming languages as well, not just C#.… Read more
In the previous lesson I showed you how the compiler actually implements events by actually adding two methods named addon() and removeon() in the background and making the Action field private, so we can’t invoke it. But that was done in MSIL language, and we really don’t need to deal with such a low level.… Read more
Events are a more secure way of implementing the observer pattern described in the previous lesson, and they are the evolutionary step of raw delegates. You may have heard about the event-driven programming as a concept that describes a programming paradigm in which the flow of the program is determined by events such as user actions (mouse clicks, key presses), sensor outputs, or messages from other programs or threads.… Read more
According to Microsoft, observer pattern is a behavioral design that allows one object to notify other objects about changes in its state.
Many beginner programmers (and even more experienced ones) have a hard time understanding the link between delegates and events, and the core upon which this link is built is represented precisely by the observer pattern.… Read more
Let’s consider the following Action:
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using System; namespace HelloWorld { public class Program { public static void Main() { int i = 0; Action a = () => i++; a(); a(); a(); Console. |
Remember from the lesson lambda expressions that we can declare a method locally, without a name, and use it only in one place, where we declare it. This is an example of a lambda expression:
There are five builtin delegate types that you can use in C#: Delegate, MulticastDelegate, Predicate, Func and Action. I’ve already described Delegate in a previous lesson. MulticastDelegate is there only for historic reasons, and it allows us to chain up delegates, but you will rarely or never use it directly.… Read more