This is actually nothing new but sometimes you might still need a quick reference for to remember how to do this quickly… Say you have a generic class that does something like generating a report and display it somehow (or save or whatever the class do) and want all the ‘calling classes’ to just pass the ‘Method’ that it must ‘run’ in order to generate the report. Yes there are probably nice and fancy tools these days that could also do it if you have the mulla for it…

A solution is to use Anonymous methods that has been with C# (.Net) since version 3 of something.

Reporter r = new Reporter();
r.Report = delegate
{
string stuff = "example report yada yada yada";
return stuff;
}
r.Show();

The generic class that provides the ‘generic’ functionality can then look something like this using a defined delegate so it knows what output it will receive when ‘running’ the method.

public delegate string RefreshActionDelegate();
class Reporter
{
    public RefreshActionDelegate Report { get; set; }

    public Show()
    {
       if (Report != null)
       {
          string theContent = Report();
          DoSomethingWithContent(theContent);
       }
    }
}

This is just a quick example but it shows how you can use the main ‘generic’ class from multiple places each time just passing a different ‘Method’ with its own functionality.