Question

In my User class I have the password which is SecureString. To save the password, I have added the UserPassword property.

Sample code:

internal partial class User
{
    public string ID { get; set; }

    private string _password;
    public SecureString Password 
    {
        set { _password = SomePasswordHashing(value.ToString); }
    }

    public string UserPassword 
    {
        get { return _password; }
        set { _password = value; }
    }
}

For the saving/retrieving of the UserPassword, does this property need to be public?

Is there a way not to load a UserPassword property (for instance when searching for the users, I would want to exclude loading all users’ passwords)?

Answer 1

For the saving/retrieving of the UserPassword, does this property need
to be public?

Yes. EF-Code first needs properties to be public.

Is there a way not to load a UserPassword property (for instance when
searching for the users, I would want to exclude loading all users’
passwords)?

You can transform the results when searching to exclude passwords

var users = db.Users.Where(/* */).Select(u => new User{Name = u.Name});

Or use a DTO class which does not have a password property and return the DTO classes instead of the model object.