What is the best practice for using public fields?

Question

When I write a class I always expose private fields through a public property like this:

private int _MyField;
public int MyField
{ get{return _MyField; }
         


        

Answer 1

The answer I give is that Properties are more Refactor friendly.

If you have an assembly with read-only fields, then change them to properties. If you have another assembly that I accessing the fields (now properties), they wont work without a compile. Fields and properties are not the same as far as the compiler is concerned.

Back to refactoring, say you started with a property. Now you need to change where the data is coming from (you will access it from another class). If you were dealing with fields you have some hard decisions to make on how to make that happen. Properties are much more forgiving -- because you can hide logic in them.