The true reason for delegates

It so happens that besides these architectural considerations that we've mentioned, there was another reason that was key to the design: ensuring that a .NET program would never produce a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

So, the team tackled the problem scientifically and made a statistical analysis of their causes (more than 70,000 of these screens were used in the analysis). It turned out that around 90% of the causes for this problem were due to drivers, and the only thing they could do was get serious with manufacturers, asking them to pass the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and little else.

Note

The current HCL page for Windows can be found at https://sysdev.microsoft.com/en-us/hardware/lpl/.

So, they had a remaining 10% problem due to their own software, but the big surprise was that instead of finding five or 10 core causes for these failures, the problem focused mainly on just two reasons:

• Pointer to functions that get lost, which I represent in the...