C# Language Pocket Reference

Events

Event handling is essentially a process in which one object can notify other objects that an event has occurred. This process is largely encapsulated by multicast delegates, which have this ability built in.

Defining a Delegate for an Event

The .NET Framework provides many event-handling delegates, but you can write your own. For example:

public delegate void MoveEventHandler(object source, MoveEventArgs e);

By convention, the delegate’s first parameter denotes the source of the event, and the delegate’s second parameter derives from System.EventArgs and contains data about the event.

Storing Data for an Event with EventArgs

The EventArgs class may be derived from to include information relevant to a particular event:

using System;
public class MoveEventArgs : EventArgs {
  public int newPosition;
  public bool cancel;
  public MoveEventArgs(int newPosition) {
    this.newPosition = newPosition;
  }
}

Declaring and Firing an Event

A class or struct can declare an event by applying the event modifier to a delegate field. In this example, the slider class has a Position property that fires a Move event whenever its Position changes:

public class Slider {
  int position;
  public event MoveEventHandler Move;
  public int Position {
    get { return position; }
    set {
      if (position != value) { // if position changed
        if (Move != null) { // if invocation list not
                            // empty
          MoveEventArgs args = new MoveEventArgs(value);
          Move(this, args); // fire event
          if (args.cancel)
            return;
        }
        position = value;
      }
    }  
  }
}

The ...