Question

I’m trying to recover the code of a delegate, by converting it to a string, with no success so far ):

Take this piece of code for example:

Delegate del = new Delegate()
del = (MethodInvoker) delegate { MessageBox.Show("hello from delegate") };

I wanna know if there is any operation I can perform on del to retrieve a string representing its C# code.

I Guess what i’m looking for is Serialization, but i’m not sure…
I’ve tried the Delegate.ToString() but it doesnt retur what i want…

Answer 1

There is no such option.

The delegate can be seen as yet another method. The compiler compiles this down to some MSIL instructions. At that point you lost the original C# source in your assembly and hence, therefore lost the possibility of showing the original C# code itself. (There are some reverse engineering options but those are way to complex).

You can use expressions to setup a representation of what you want and let the runtime boil it down to whatever is required by then (C#, MSIL, SQL etc). example:

Expression<Action> expr = () => MessageBox.Show("test");

Console.WriteLine(expr.ToString()); 
// () => Show("test")