Performance

As mentioned throughout this chapter, events are implemented in the .NET Framework using delegates. This has a performance cost. For most events, especially those involved with user interaction such as Click and MouseOver, the performance hit is negligible. For some events in some applications, such as the Paint event in very high-performance or drawing-intensive applications, the performance penalty may be significant.

Creating a custom control and overriding the protected event method without adding a delegate has many benefits, one of which may be a small reduction in this performance penalty. This technique will be covered in Chapter 17.