Question

I saw this (http://code.google.com/p/easyprop/) library and it seems a good library. I am wondering if anybody using it in commercial product? Is it a mature library?

Answer 1

I never used the thing yet I can tell that the library is not very useful (imo, of course). This is why:

• It does not do anything useful. It just implements INPC on auto-properties
• In order for it to work you have to make your properties virtual (that is not necessarily bad, but I think that doing this just for the sake of INPC isn’t sensible; Entity Framework also uses this technique but it gives you much more features to justify the unnecessary virtual members)
• You have to use a builder to create your objects instead of the constructor (same goes for POCO EntityFramework). Again, this is not so bad, but the problem here is that you won’t be able to make use of e.g. DataGrid adding functionality which uses the default parameterless constructor to initialize a new object.
• As soon as you need some custom functionality in your properties you will hit a wall and will have to go back to the usual property implementation. E.g. you may have a calculated property that depends on a value of some other property.

Example:

public int UsualProperty 
{
  get { return this._usualProperty; }
  set
  {
    this._usualProperty = value;
    this.OnPropertyChanged("UsualProperty");
    // And notify that the CalculatedProperty changed too
    this.OnPropertyChanged("CalculatedProperty");
  }
}
public int CalculatedProperty
{
  get { return this.UsualProperty * 2; }
}

Note how you must implement the INPC interface yourself in such situation.

To sum up: In my opinion this lib gives you very little and takes away too much.