Question

From what I can tell, properties are used to provide accessor method-esque functionality; however, they do so at the cost of normal method inheritance behavior. Are there any advantages to using properties versus conventional setter/getter methods? What are the pros/cons of properties and accessor methods?

Answer 1

I think you might be confused. In your examples, the above methods should be accessible. For example, given this set of types, the following should work:

public class Base
{
    public virtual int Datum { get; set; }
}

public class Derived : Base
{
    public override int Datum
    {
        get { return 12; }
        // set method remains as normal, with just the get overriden
    }

    public void SetDatumMethod(int newValue)
    {
        Datum = newValue; // Datum as a property is still accessible
    }
}

The derived class still inherits the property. Properties really are just syntactic sugar in C# (mostly), as the compiler is generating set_Datum(int x) and get_Datum() methods behind the scenes for you. The property get/set methods can still be overridden individually as shown above.

The advantage of using properties is that they have additional semantic meaning; they “contain” or “represent” data in some fashion, not a method for generating the data.