Question

Let’s say I have a class that exposes one property. Is it considered to be a good aproach to use the private ‘holder variable’ for internal use in the class? Or should I use the property for internal use also.

To explain, should I use:

public class foo {     String _statusHolder;     public String myStaus     {         get { return _statusHolder; }         set{ _statusHolder = value; }     }      public void DisplayMyStatus()     {         Console.WriteLine(_statusHolder);     } } 

Or:

public class foo {     String _statusHolder;     public String myStaus     {         get { return _statusHolder; }         set{ _statusHolder = value; }     }      public void DisplayMyStatus()     {         Console.WriteLine(myStaus);     } } 

I could see it as beeing more consistent and more readable to use the second approach. It would also be more effective if I would later do some modificatins in the set-statement. But are there any performance issues or is it considered bad-practise for some reason?

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EDIT:

It seems that everybody is leaning towards using the property internally. My initial thoughts was the same, but as a novice programmer, you can never know. Thanks everyone for the quick feedback!

Answer 1

I tend to go with calling the properties cause once stuff gets tricky you can put in locking and business logic in the getter

For C# 3.0 I would go with something along these lines (and only explicitly create the backing field when its really needed)

public class foo {      public String Status     {         get;         set;     }      public void DisplayMyStatus()     {         Console.WriteLine(Status);     } }