When to use get and set properties in C#

c#

Solution

According to the Property Usage Guidelines on MSDN:

Use a property when the member is a logical data member. In the following member declarations, Name is a property because it is a logical member of the class.

Use a method when:

- The operation is a conversion, such as `Object.ToString`.

- The operation is expensive enough that you want to communicate to the user that they should consider caching the result.

- Obtaining a property value using the get accessor would have an observable side effect.

- Calling the member twice in succession produces different results.

- The order of execution is important. Note that a type's properties should be able to be set and retrieved in any order.

- The member is static but returns a value that can be changed.

- The member returns an array. Properties that return arrays can be very misleading. Usually it is necessary to return a copy of the internal array so that the user cannot change internal state. This, coupled with the fact that a user can easily assume it is an indexed property, leads to inefficient code. In the following code example, each call to the Methods property creates a copy of the array. As a result, 2n+1 copies of the array will be created in the following loop.

Problem

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