Question

I have a simple question. I designed a C# class where I got some property getters who are responsible for doing some performance expensive tasks. I have many properties like that in my class. My question, are those property getters are evaluated as soon as the the instance of the class is loaded into the memory ? If so, then, I will consider breaking them into methods. I hope they evaluated only when the property is used for the first time, but I need to be sure about it about this assumption.

I know I should use methods for expensive tasks, but I just found using Properties are more maintainable where I have many many members in a class.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Property getters/setters are evaluated for every call to/from them. They are nothing more than syntactic for methods.

public class Foo
{
   private int actual = 0;
   public int Bar
   {
      get { return actual++; }
      set { value = actual; value++ }
   }
}

int v = foo.Bar; //0
v = foo.Bar; // 1
v = foo.Bar; // 2
foo.Bar = v; // actual = 3