Question

I was wondering what people thought of using properties as object initializers in C#. For some reason it seems to break the fundamentals of what constructors are used for.

An example…

public class Person {     string firstName;     string lastName;      public string FirstName     {       get { return firstName; }       set { firstName = value; }     }      public string LastName     {       get { return lastName; }       set { lastName= value; }     } } 

Then doing object intialization with…..

Person p = new Person{ FirstName = 'Joe', LastName = 'Smith' }; Person p = new Person{ FirstName = 'Joe' }; 

Answer 1

What you see here is some syntatic sugar provided by the compiler. Under the hood what it really does is something like:

Person p = new Person( FirstName = ‘Joe’, LastName = ‘Smith’ );

Person _p$1 = new Person(); _p$1.FirstName = 'Joe'; _p$1.LastName = 'Smith'; Person p = _p$1; 

So IMHO you are not really breaking any constructor fundamentals but using a nice language artifact in order to ease readability and maintainability.