High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A delegate is a form of type-safe function pointer used by the .NET Framework. Delegates specify a method to call and optionally an object to call the method on. They are used, among other things, to implement callbacks and event listeners. It encapsulates a reference of a method inside a delegate object. The delegate object can then be passed to code which can call the referenced method, without having to know at compile time which method will be invoked.