Question

This is something I’m not much consistent about and always curious about what other people do.

How do you access internal properties (private or public)?

For example you’ve got this property :

Private _Name As String  Public Property Name() As String     Get         Return _Name     End Get     Set(ByVal value As String)         _Name = value     End Set End Property 

In the same class within another function which one do you prefer? and why?

_Name = 'Johnny' 

or

Name = 'Johnny' 

Ignore the fact that I used Name instead of Me.Name.

Answer 1

Personally I prefer to use the property where possible. This means you still get the validation, and you can easily put breakpoints on the property access. This doesn’t work where you’re trying to make a change to two properties which validate against each other – for instance, a ‘min and max’ pair, where each has a validation constraint such that min <= max at all times. You might have (C#):

public void SetMinMax(int min, int max) {     if (max > min)     {         throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException('max';     }     // We're okay now - no need to validate, so go straight to fields     this.min = min;     this.max = max; } 

At some point in the future, I’d like to see C# gain the ability to declare the backing field within the property, such that it’s private to just the property:

public string Name {     string name;      get { return name; }     set     {         if (value == null)         {             throw new ArgumentNullException('value');         }             name = value;     } } 

Outside the property, you wouldn’t be able to get at name at all, only Name. We already have this for automatically implemented properties, but they can’t contain any logic.