I'm still on this anonymous delegates kick. Maybe I'm on the wrong team and should consider a move to the C# team??

I've seen references to the feature of anonymous delegates as both "anonymous delegates" and "anonymous methods". From a philosophical standpoint, both seem like bad names. It had been bothering me for a while, so I decided to ask my fellow CLR buddy, Joe, the question. Joe is a good person to go to since he's a lot smarter than me. Joe handles concurrency and threading for our team. Joe was doing such a good job at concurrency that they decided that he could handle another job ;)

Anyway, Joe agreed that both names are misleading. Here's what we came up with for what the features would be if you interpreted the names literally:

- anonymous delegates: the ability to define a delegate (the actual declaration) in a more dynamic manner, in which you do not need to statically define the signature/contract of the delegate up-front. Joel and I did a quick co-routines implementation on top of the framework last summer. My first thought was to use delegates. This failed pretty quickly given that you need to delegate signature to be something better than "public delegate Object[] CoRoutineDelegate(Object[])".

- anonymous methods: the ability to define and generate a method in a more dynamic manner, in which you do not need to statically define the signature/contact of the method up-front or care which class it sites on. All you really want here is some sort of handle/reference to that method that you can pass around and call through as needed.

The second definition here feels a lot more like what I've been calling anonymous delegates. In fact, that's more or less how this feature that we've been discussing actually works. I guess "anonymous methods" is really a better term.

Just for kicks, I decided to make a category on anonymous methods so that folks can link back to all the posts, since there are quite a few now. I'm hoping that this post was the last one on the subject, unless I get some interesting feedback from the C# team. With that, it's now time to get back to my factoring features in Whidbey series, which is in dire need of some attention.