When to use Properties and Methods?
.net, c#, coding-style
Solution
It is pure syntactic sugar. On the back end, it is compiled into plain get and set methods.
Use it because of convention, and that it looks nicer.
Some guidelines are that when it has a high risk of throwing Exceptions or going wrong, don't use properties but explicit getters/setters. But generally even then they are used.
Problem
I'm new to the .NET world having come from C++ and I'm trying to better understand properties. I noticed in the .NET framework Microsoft uses properties all over the place. Is there an advantage for using properties rather than creating get/set methods? Is there a general guideline (as well as naming convention) for when one should use properties?