#388 – Declaring and Using Private Events

You can declare private events in a class and they can be either instance or static events.  A private event is one that code within the class can subscribe to, but that is not visible to code outside the class.

For example, we can create a private static event in the Dog class that will fire whenever a new dog is created.

        private static event EventHandler<DogCreatedEventArgs> DogCreated;

This event will be visible only to code within the Dog class.

In the static constructor, we attach a handler that will record each Dog created.

        static Dog()
        {
            Dog.DogCreated += new EventHandler<DogCreatedEventArgs>(Dog_DogCreated);
        }

        static List<string> DogList = new List<string>();
        static void Dog_DogCreated(object sender, DogCreatedEventArgs e)
        {
            DogList.Add(e.Name);
        }

Finally, we fire the event from the instance constructor.

        public Dog(string name)
        {
            Name = name;

            if (Dog.DogCreated != null)
                Dog.DogCreated(this, new DogCreatedEventArgs(name));
        }