When would I use a delegate in asp.net?

Question

I'm always looking for a way to use all the tools I can and to stretch myself just beyond where I am at. But as much as I have read about delegates, I can never find a place to use them (like Interfaces, Generics, and a lot of stuff, but I digress.) I was hoping someone could show me when and how they used a delegate in web programming for asp.net c#(2.0 and above).

Thank you and if this wrong for Stack Overflow, please just let me know.

Answer 1

You can use delegates whenever you know you will want to take some action, but the details of that action will depend on circumstances.

Among other things, we use delegates for:

• Sorting and filtering, especially if the user can choose between different sorting/filtering criteria
• Simplifying code. For example, a longish process where the beginning and end are always the same, but a small middle bit varies. Instead of having a hard-to-read if block in the middle, I have one method for the whole process, and pass in a delegate (Action) for the middle bit.
• I have a very useful ToString method in my presentation layer which converts a collection of anything into a comma-separated list. The method parameters are an IEnumerable and a Func delegate for turning each T in the collection into a string. It works equally well for stringing together Users by their FirstName or for listing Projects by their ID.