The Object Class

As indicated earlier, all .NET classes are ultimately derived from System.Object. In fact, if you don't specify a base class when you define a class, the compiler will automatically assume that it derives from Object. Because inheritance has not been used in this chapter, every class you have seen here is actually derived from System.Object. (As noted earlier, for structs this derivation is indirect: A struct is always derived from System.ValueType, which in turn derives from System.Object.)

The practical significance of this is that, besides the methods and properties and so on that you define, you also have access to a number of public and protected member methods that have been define

Delegates

Delegates exist for situations in which you want to pass methods around to other methods. To see what that means, consider this line of code:

 int i = int.Parse('99'); 

You are so used to passing data to methods as parameters, as in this example, you don't consciously think about it; and for this reason the idea of passing methods around instead of data might sound a little strange. However, there are cases in which you have a method that does something, and rather than operating on data, the method might need to do something that involves invoking another method. To complicate things further,