Is it better to use Enumerable.Empty() as opposed to new List() to initialize an IEnumerable?

Question

Suppose you have a class Person :

public class Person
{
   public string Name { get; set;}
   public IEnumerable Roles {get; set;}
}
         


        

Answer 1

The problem with your approach is that you can't add any items to the collection - I would have a private structure like list and then expose the items as an Enumerable:

public class Person
{
    private IList _roles;

    public Person()
    {
        this._roles = new List();
    }

    public string Name { get; set; }

    public void AddRole(Role role)
    {
        //implementation
    }

    public IEnumerable Roles
    {
        get { return this._roles.AsEnumerable(); }
    }
}

If you intend some other class to create the list of roles (which I wouldn't recommend) then I wouldn't initialise the enumerable at all in Person.