Combining and Abusing Delegates

I had never before thought much about combining delegates until I came across some code that combined them using lambdas, and it got me thinking about other ways to use them. Consider the following example. Note: crazy code ahead!

public class Programmer
{
    Action<string> a;

    public Programmer(string name)
    {
        this.Name = name;
    }

    public string Name { get; set; }

    public bool ShouldDesign
    {
        set
        {
            if (value)
                a += s => { Console.WriteLine(Name + " should design " + s); };
        }
    }

    public bool ShouldDevelop
    {
        set
        {
            if (value)
                a += s => { Console.WriteLine(Name + " should develop " + s); };
        }
    }

    public bool ShouldDeploy
    {
        set
        {
            if (value)
                a += s => { Console.WriteLine(Name + " should deploy " + s); };
        }
    }

    public void Work(string programName)
    {
        a(programName);
    }
}

And then used in a console app like this:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var paul = new Programmer("Paul");
    paul.ShouldDesign = true;
    paul.ShouldDevelop = true;
    paul.ShouldDeploy = false;

    paul.Work("my application");

    Console.ReadKey();
}

And the output…

I do not encourage the kind of code I’ve created here, but maybe this will get you thinking!