What is Delegate?

I like to think of a delegate as "a pointer to a function". This goes back to C days, but the idea still holds.

The idea is that you need to be able to invoke a piece of code, but that piece of code you're going to invoke isn't known until runtime. So you use a "delegate" for that purpose. Delegates come in handy for things like event handlers, and such, where you do different things based on different events, for example.

Here's a reference for C# you can look at:

In C#, for example, let's say we had a calculation we wanted to do and we wanted to use a different calculation method which we don't know until runtime. So we might have a couple calculation methods like this:

public static double CalcTotalMethod1(double amt)
{
    return amt * .014;
}

public static double CalcTotalMethod2(double amt)
{
    return amt * .056 + 42.43;
}

We could declare a delegate signature like this:

public delegate double calcTotalDelegate(double amt);

And then we could declare a method which takes the delegate as a parameter like this:

public static double CalcMyTotal(double amt, calcTotalDelegate calcTotal)
{
    return calcTotal(amt);
}

And we could call the CalcMyTotal method passing in the delegate method we wanted to use.

double tot1 = CalcMyTotal(100.34, CalcTotalMethod1);
double tot2 = CalcMyTotal(100.34, CalcTotalMethod2);
Console.WriteLine(tot1);
Console.WriteLine(tot2);

a delegate is simply a function pointer.
simply put you assign the method you wish to run your delegate. then later in code you can call that method via Invoke.

some code to demonstrate (wrote this from memory so syntax may be off)

delegate void delMyDelegate(object o);

private void MethodToExecute1(object o)
{
    // do something with object
}

private void MethodToExecute2(object o)
{
    // do something else with object
}

private void DoSomethingToList(delMyDelegate methodToRun)
{
    foreach(object o in myList)
        methodToRun.Invoke(o);
}

public void ApplyMethodsToList()
{
    DoSomethingToList(MethodToExecute1);
    DoSomethingToList(MethodToExecute2);
}