Raising events by calling delegates - why not by event name?

Question

I have looking at an old piece of code and cannot somehow understand the following:

public event EventHandler NameChanged;
#endregion

#region protected void OnNameChanged(EventArgs args)
/// <summary>
/// Raises NameChanged event.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="args">Event arguments.</param>
protected void OnNameChanged(EventArgs args)
{
    EventHandler eh = this.NameChanged;
    if (eh != null)
    {
        eh(this, args);
    }
}

Why is the event raised by an invocation of the delegate? Could I not simply call the event itself (NameChanged) as usual?

EDIT: I can see this is also suggested on MSDN: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/events/

Answer 1

Whenever you reference an event, you are in fact copying the invocation list to the local reference. By doing that, you make sure that between checking the validity of the event eh != null and invoking the event eh(this, args)eh's value wouldn't change (maybe from a different thread).

In C# 6, there is a new operator https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/operators/null-conditional-operators

You could just do this instead:

NameChanged?.Invoke(this, args);