C# Language Events

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Introduction

An event is a notification that something has occurred (such as a mouse click) or, in some cases, is about to occur (such as a price change).

Classes can define events and their instances (objects) may raise these events. For instance, a Button may contain a Click event that gets raised when a user has clicked it.

Event handlers are then methods that get called when their corresponding event is raised. A form may contain a Clicked event handler for every Button it contains, for instance.

Parameters

ParameterDetails
EventArgsTThe type that derives from EventArgs and contains the event parameters.
EventNameThe name of the event.
HandlerNameThe name of the event handler.
SenderObjectThe object that's invoking the event.
EventArgumentsAn instance of the EventArgsT type that contains the event parameters.

Remarks

When raising an event:

  • Always check if the delegate is null. A null delegate means the event has no subscribers. Raising an event with no subscribers will result in a NullReferenceException.
6.0
  • Copy the delegate (e.g. EventName) to a local variable (e.g. eventName) before checking for null / raising the event. This avoids race conditions in multi-threaded environments:

Wrong:

    if(Changed != null)      // Changed has 1 subscriber at this point
                             // In another thread, that one subscriber decided to unsubscribe
        Changed(this, args); // `Changed` is now null, `NullReferenceException` is thrown.

Right:

    // Cache the "Changed" event as a local. If it is not null, then use
    // the LOCAL variable (handler) to raise the event, NOT the event itself.
    var handler = Changed;
    if(handler != null)
        handler(this, args);
6.0
  • Use the null-conditional operator (?.) for raising the method instead of null-checking the delegate for subscribers in an if statement: EventName?.Invoke(SenderObject, new EventArgsT());
  • When using Action<> to declare delegate types, the anonymous method / event handler signature must be the same as the declared anonymous delegate type in the event declaration.


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