Question

Now if you read the naming conventions in the MSDN for C# you will notice that it states that properties are always preferred over public and protected fields. I have even been told by some people that you should never use public or protected fields. Now I will agree I have yet to find a reason in which I need to have a public field but are protected fields really that bad?

I can see it if you need to make sure that certain validation checks are performed when getting/setting the value however a lot of the time it seems like just extra overhead in my opinion. I mean lets say I have a class GameItem with fields for baseName, prefixName, and suffixName. Why should I take the overhead of both creating the properties (C#) or accessor methods and the performance hit I would occur (if I do this for every single field in an application, I am sure that it would adds up at less a little especially in certain languages like PHP or certain applications with performance is critical like games)?

Answer 1

Are protected members/fields really that bad?

No. They are way, way worse.

As soon as a member is more accessible than private, you are making guarantees to other classes about how that member will behave. Since a field is totally uncontrolled, putting it “out in the wild” opens your class and classes that inherit from or interact with your class to higher bug risk. There is no way to know when a field changes, no way to control who or what changes it.

If now, or at some point in the future, any of your code ever depends on a field some certain value, you now have to add validity checks and fallback logic in case it’s not the expected value – every place you use it. That’s a huge amount of wasted effort when you could’ve just made it a damn property instead 😉

The best way to share information with deriving classes is the read-only property:

protected object MyProperty { get; }

If you absolutely have to make it read/write, don’t. If you really, really have to make it read-write, rethink your design. If you still need it to be read-write, apologize to your colleagues and don’t do it again 🙂

A lot of developers believe – and will tell you – that this is overly strict. And it’s true that you can get by just fine without being this strict. But taking this approach will help you go from just getting by to remarkably robust software. You’ll spend far less time fixing bugs.

And regarding any concerns about performance – don’t. I guarantee you will never, in your entire career, write code so fast that the bottleneck is the call stack itself.