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Anonymous methods cannot access ref/out parameters

Just throwin’ this post up because I was suprised by a compiler error I just received and noticed that there were only two search results for it when I looked for an explanation. Basically the problem is exactly what the title of this post says: you can’t access ref/out parameters from within an anoymous delegate. The exact C# compiler error you’ll get is:

Cannot use ref or out parameter ‘yourParameterNameHere’ inside an anonymous method block

At first I was like “hmm, that’s pretty lame… wonder why that would be?”. Then I thought about the actual implementation of anonymous delegates and the way that variables are “enclosed”, which is detailed very nicely by this MSDN Magazine article, and it all made sense. Obviously they have no way to do a “pointer to a pointer” on the class that the compiler emits since there’s no such concept available in safe, managed code.

That said, the work around is pretty easy: in your method that takes a ref/out parameter you just need a local variable which you work with internally and assign that reference to the parameter when the work is done.

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