Before we get into the next shortcut, we need to understand how methods are passed to other methods as arguments. This is possible and sometimes necessary in C#.

For example, say we need to check if there are even values in an array (you don’t need to know much about arrays here, except that they are lists of values).

First you need an array of values and the IsEven() method that returns true if its argument is even:

int[] numbers = {1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8};

public static bool IsEven(int num)
{
  return num % 2 == 0;
}

Pass both of these as arguments to the method Array.Exists(), which returns a boolean value:

bool hasEvenNumber = Array.Exists(numbers, IsEven);

You can see that IsEven, a method, is passed as the second argument to Array.Exists().

In the background, this is what Array.Exists() does:

• The IsEven() method is called with each value in the array. We can imagine each of these being called:

  IsEven(1);
  IsEven(3);
  IsEven(5);
  IsEven(6);

• If any of these return true, Array.Exists() returns true.

By the end, Array.Exists() returns true because isEven(6) returns true.

There are other methods that accept methods as arguments, which you will encounter later on. For now, you need to understand that we can use a method’s name like a variable, e.g. IsEven is a variable representing the method IsEven(). We pass this variable to another method, like Array.Exists(), which will probably invoke that method-argument at least once within its own body.