Question

I’ve been looking at strategy pattern implementation examples and it seems to me like they are very similar to c# delegates. The only difference I see is that strategy pattern implementations don’t need to explicitly declare a delegate.

But other than that, they both seem to point to functions that need a specific signature and they can both be used to determine what to execute at run time.

Is there a more obvious difference that I am missing?

I guess a related question would be, IF they are similar, what’s the advantage of using one over the other?

Answer 1

Put simply, you can use delegates to implement strategy pattern.

Strategy pattern is a pattern. Delegates are a language feature. You use the language feature to implement the pattern. They reside in two separate categories of concepts altogether, but are related in their interaction with each other.

In other words, strategy pattern is the blueprint, the C# delegates are the bricks. You can’t build the (strategy pattern) house without either. (You could build it with other kinds of bricks also, but nothing in the language feature of delegates inherently describes strategy pattern).