Jeff Atwood has blogged about it:
There are valid reasons to make a trivial property, exactly as depicted above:
- Reflection works differently on variables vs. properties, so if you rely on reflection, it's easier to use all properties.
- You can't databind against a variable.
- Changing a variable to a property is a breaking change.
It's a shame there's so much meaningless friction between variables and properties; most of the time they do the exact same thing. Kevin Dente proposed a bit of new syntax that would give us the best of both worlds:
public property int Name;
However, if the distinction between variable and property is such an ongoing problem, I wonder if a more radical solution is in order. Couldn't we ditch variables entirely in favor of properties? Don't properties do exactly the same thing as variables, but with better granular control over visibility?
