What exactly is /technically/ happening when I raise an event in .NET? I couldn't answer this question myself via Google.
I don't mean: the event is raised and suddenly some handler is being called, I mean what is happning in between? Are the events somehow stored on an invisible event stack? Are they queued somewhere? How many events can I raise? etc.
I hope someone can shed some light on how the .NET virtual machine processes events.
Regular .NET events are usually simply delegate invocations, which are not very much different to regular method invocations. The only subtle difference is that because delegates are multi-cast, it has to unroll the full invocation list of all subscribers, and invoke them in turn. This all happens during the delegate .Invoke(). So no, there is no special event stack / queue.
However! Some things on UI technologies (winforms, WPF, etc) do use the Windows message loop - so in those cases, yes, there is a logical queue.
Each delegate subscription (i.e. foo.SomeEvent += this.SomeHandler) involves two things: a target instance (the this) and a target method (SomeHandler). When invoked, the delegate simply invokes the method against the specified target. Slightly magic, but not that different to regular method invoke.
