Aw, the 18th of July 08 was an unforgettable day. So it was a friday evening around 5pm i was sitting in a Bus, heading towards Seattle from Bluemond. Things were pretty usual on that friday till i noticed something absurd, something really funny. We were travelling over a ramp that would help us enter WA-520 and i could clearly see that Bluemond police have cordoned off WA-520 and the road was blocked to public transit. Hmm, something goin on.

We cruised along (dont ask me how, shall get to it soon) and within minutes merged onto I-5 and holy lord! I-5 suffered a similar fate. Cmon, you gotta be kiddin me, whoz blockin an Interstate highway? Only difference was it was the Seattle police this time. And i just noticed an array of police officers whizz alongside our bus. Every exit, ramp, entry, in/out of I-5 was blocked.

Our driver turned on the local radio, i heard it say, "For some reason, I-5 seems to be gridlocked". One of my friends pulled out his y-phone and checked the traffic. Trust me, what we saw was funny, very funny. The traffic before us was fully green and behind us was all red ;) Well, it was like this, since we, Xsft's interns had to goto seattle from bluemond for a party, the company had had the entire route blocked to public transit but open only to us. Waaw, its so evil but without a doubt good to be on the other side of a road block, atleast for once :)

YaaaaY! So, what the heck am i screaming about :)
Alright non-technical folks, am gonna disappoint you, this is purely a tech post.

So, there is this spec for partial methods in C# :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488.aspx

And the very last line says:
You cannot make a delegate to a partial method.

Why:
Am not pretty sure of the reason behind this design decision, but one of my friend points out that the reason could be,

say you have a partial method declaration like partial void foo();
and a partial method implementation like
partial void foo()
{

}

Lets say now that you make a delegate to Foo, and after sometime, you may choose to remove the implementation from the code. So partial methods allow the impl to be removed and declaration to still be there. But still you'll have your delegate pointing to foo and it will result in a build failure for the project and may be they preferred not to encourage such confusions?

Alright, whats the big deal about it?
Well, have u tried creating a delegate to a partial method ever?
Darn it, it works! I mean the C#3.0 compiler shipped with Visual Studio 2008, accepts a delegate to a partial method.

Well its not a tricky bug or a gotcha in the C# compiler that i stumbled upon, but a mere non-adherence to the compiler spec(the ultimate authority).

I even thought it could be a documentation defect but turns out that its not so. Right now, the C# team is investigating this.

Anyway, finding a bug in the shipped C# compiler is something that i could scream about... so, YaaaaY !