Question

I have a property which looks like this.

public int NumberOfElephants { get; set; }

this property is in an observablecollection and it has to notify another property that it has changed.

how would i do the following

public int NumberOfElephants { get; set { OnPropertyChanged("totalAnimals"); }

without the code needing to be like this

private int _numberOfElephants;
public int NumberOfElephants { 
    get { 
        return _numberOfElephants; 
    } 

    set { 
        _numberOfElephants = value; 
        OnPropertyChanged("totalAnimals"); 
    } 
}

Answer 1

You don’t. You can’t.

Automatically implemented propertieS only work when the property is trivial – when no code is needed for the get/set beyond “return the variable’s value” or “set the variable’s value”. You can make it shorter with reformatting, of course… I’d write that as:

private int numberOfElephants;
public int NumberOfElephants {
    get { return numberOfElephants; }

    set {
        _numberOfElephants = value; 
        OnPropertyChanged("totalAnimals"); 
    } 
}

Actually, I’d use “opening brace on a line on its own” for the start of the set and the start of the property, but I’ve kept your favoured style for those. But having “single expression get/set implementations” on a single line can make classes with lots of properties much cleaner.