Question

I always see properties using a private variable to hold the value like this.

private int _myValue;
public int MyValue { get { return _myValue; } set { _myValue = value; } }

Why can’t I just skip the private variable and do this…

public int MyValue { get { return MyValue; } set { MyValue = value; } }

*Note: I didn’t want to use auto properties because I was hoping to be able to do something like this.

public int MyValue { get { return MyValue.Tolower().Trim(); } set { MyValue = value; } }

Answer 1

Because the infinite loop would eventually cause a StackOverflowException to be thrown.