Question

I have a class that has some properties. And I want something that calculates a Score out of these properties. Since this is a trivial task (some additions and divisions, but nothing spectacular).

So naturally, the question is: ‘When to use a Property with some code in the getter, and when to use a function?’, and that question was already answered.

Now, I wonder about one thing though: If – against all expectations – I ever needed to make this Getter so complicated that it should be a function (for example, because I need to put data in or because it can throw an exception or whatever), is it easy to change a Property into a Method?

Of course, it seems really trivial, just changing

public double Score {     get {         return Math.Round(A + B / C * D,3);     } } 

to

public double Score(){     return Math.Round(A + B / C * D,3); } 

But I wonder: Are there any side effects? Is anything going to break when changing stuff around like this? I can only ever see this as a possible problem when Reflection is involved, but what in situations where I have 2 Assemblies – one that defines the class and one that uses the class – and only change the one that contains the class without recompiling the consumer assembly. Is that a possible source of ‘weird bugs that are nearly impossible to track’ or is it completely safe to change Properties to Methods?

Answer 1

No. There are no side affects to this at all.

Pull up reflector, you’ll see that your properties already are methods

Under the hood the get and set accessors in a property are simply converted to get_MyPropertyName() and set_MyPropertyName() methods. This is also why you can (but typically shouldn’t) add parameters to a property.

The only ‘gotcha’ is that in C# you will need to add ‘()’ to any existing calls.

Also

according to the coding guidelines, a property name usually is noun (i.e. Score), but methods should describe actions (verb), so more proper name is GetScore() or CalculateScore()