Castor oil is a vegetable oil derived from the castor bean seed in its purest form. It is colorless, odorless and tasteless.
Encoding globally available pointers helps protect them from being exploited. The EncodePointer function obfuscates the pointer value with a secret so that it cannot be predicted by an external agent. The secret used by EncodePointer is different for each process. A pointer must be decoded before it can be used.
A delegate is an object that represents a pointer to a function. However, it is not an ordinary function pointer in that it: 1) Is Object Oriented. 2) Is type safe, i.e. it can only point to a method and you cannot read the raw memory address it is pointing to.