#1,158 – Events vs. Delegates, part I

You’ll typically define an event rather than using a public delegate.  Although either method will work, events provide some benefits over using delegates directly.

Below, we define a delegate type and a Barked event of that type in a Dog class:

    public delegate void DogDelegate(string dogName);

    public class Dog
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }

        public Dog(string name)
        {
            Name = name;
        }

        public event DogDelegate Barked = delegate { };

        public void Bark()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Woof");
            Barked(Name);
        }
    }

We can now handle the event as follows:

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Dog d = new Dog("Bob");
            d.Barked += d_Barked;
            d.Bark();

            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static void d_Barked(string dogName)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(dogName + " just barked");
        }

This code would all work the same if we simply removed the event keyword, making the delegate available to the client code.  (See part II for more information).