Question

I was just thinking about it and since .Net has introduced properties is there ever a situation where you would want to leave your code as a method that returns a value as opposed to a readonly property.

Answer 1

No. I’d recommend taking a look at Microsoft’s Property Usage Guidlines:

Class library designers often must
decide between implementing a class
member as a property or a method. In
general, methods represent actions and
properties represent data. Use the
following guidelines to help you
choose between these options.

• Use a property when the member is a logical data member. In the following
  member declarations, Name is a
  property because it is a logical
  member of the class.
• Use a method when:
  • The operation is a conversion, such as Object.ToString.
  • The operation is expensive enough that you want to communicate to the
    user that they should consider caching
    the result.
  • Obtaining a property value using the get accessor would have an
    observable side effect.
  • Calling the member twice in succession produces different results.
  • The order of execution is important. Note that a type’s
    properties should be able to be set
    and retrieved in any order.
  • The member is static but returns a value that can be changed.
  • The member returns an array. Properties that return arrays can be
    very misleading. Usually it is
    necessary to return a copy of the
    internal array so that the user cannot
    change internal state. This, coupled
    with the fact that a user can easily
    assume it is an indexed property,
    leads to inefficient code. In the
    following code example, each call to
    the Methods property creates a copy of
    the array. As a result, 2n+1 copies of
    the array will be created in the
    following loop.