Why do we use .NET properties instead of plain old get/set functions?

Question

I understand the many benefits of providing an interface to access the members of a class indirectly. My question is: isn\'t that already something you can accomplish in jus

Answer 1

Two big advantages to properties:

• They can be shown and edited in the Property Grid. Without properties, how would you know which methods to show editors for?
• They offer a hint that something is cheap to read and write, and that reading it causes no side effects. (It's possible to violate that, of course, but by making something a property, you're declaring that that's your intent.) Therefore, the debugger can take that hint. If you hover the mouse over a property, the debugger will show its value in a tooltip. It wouldn't make sense to do the same thing for any possible method; too easy to accidentally do something with side effects.