Properties vs Methods

Question

Quick question: When do you decide to use properties (in C#) and when do you decide to use methods?

We are busy having this debate and have found some areas where it

Answer 1

Searching through MSDN, I found a reference on Properties vs Methods that provides some great guidelines for creating methods:

• The operation is a conversion, such as Object.ToString.
• The operation is expensive enough that you want to communicate to the user that they should consider caching the result.
• Obtaining a property value using the get accessor would have an observable side effect.
• Calling the member twice in succession produces different results.
• The order of execution is important. Note that a type's properties should be able to be set and retrieved in any order.
• The member is static but returns a value that can be changed.
• The member returns an array. Properties that return arrays can be very misleading. Usually it is necessary to return a copy of the internal array so that the user cannot change internal state. This, coupled with the fact that a user can easily assume it is an indexed property, leads to inefficient code.