What it means to have body in delegates declaration?

Question

I have just seen following code:

class X
{
  static Action Ac()
  {
     return ..some other code
  }
}

What does it mean? I have never seen a delegate with its body declared.

Answer 1

That's not an Action delegate with its body declared. That's a static method of the X class called Ac(), with a return type of Action; that is, it's a class method that returns an Action delegate. The body presumably creates an Action object to return from the method.

To put it another way: it is a regular static method, which happens to return Action instead of something like string or int.

Answer 2

Delegate object which references anonymous method is declared something like (using old syntax and omitting lambda notation):

Action<int> action = delegate (int x) { 
                        //this is a body of anonymous method
                        //which is referenced by a delegate object action of type Action<int>
                        Console.WriteLine (x);
                        };

And than called like:

 action(5);