Monday, March 3, 2014

C# - Declaring Events

Events are closely related to delegates, but they are not the same thing. An event allows code to subscribe and unsubscribe using delegate instances as event handlers. The idea is that when an event is raised all the event handlers which have subscribed to the event are called. Just as a property is logically just two operations get and set, an event is also logically just two operations: subscribe and unsubscribe.


To declare an event and explicitly write these operations, you use syntax which looks like a property declaration but with add and remove instead of get and set:

Public event EventHandler CustomEvent
{
          Add
          {
                   //Implementation goes here: “Value” variable is the handler being
//subscribed to the event
          }
          Remove
          {
                   //Implementation goes here: “Value” variable is the handler being
//unsubscribed to the event
          }
}

Many events are implemented using a simple variable to store the subscribed handlers.

C# allows these events to be created simply, as field-like events:
          Public event EventHandler SimpleEvent;
This declares both the event and a variable at the same time.
It’s roughly equivalent to this:

            private EventHandler_hiddenField;
public event EventHandler SimpleEvent
{
          add
          {
                   lock(this)
                   {
                             _hiddenField += value;
                             }
                   }
                   remove
                   {
                   lock(this)
                   {
                             _hiddenField -= value;
                             }
                   }
          }

Everywhere you refer to SimpleEvent within the declaring type, the compiler actually reference _hiddenField, which is why you’re able to raise the event by calling SimpleEvent(). Outside the type declaration, however, SimpleEvent only refers to the event. This duality has caused confusion for many developers – you just need to remember that fields and events really are very different things, and field, like events are just the compiler doing some work for you.

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