Why use private members then use public properties to set them?

Question

Seen a few examples of code where this happens:

public class Foo
{
    string[] m_workID;
    public string[] WorkID
    {
        get
        {
                     


        

Answer 1

A lot of times you only want to provide read access to a field. By using a property you can provide this access. As you mention you may want to perform operations before the field is accessed (lazy loading, e.g.). You have a lot of code in there that just isn't necessary anymore unless you're still working in .Net 2.0-.