Private Set or Private member?

Question

I was wondering what\'s considered the C# best practice, private/protected members with public getters, or public getters with private/protected setters?

Answer 1

I prefer to use auto-implemented properties unless the default implementation doesn't do what I want. So in this case, since the auto-implemented property does what you need, just use that:

public int Foo { get; private set; }

However another situation is if you want to make the field readonly (meaning that the only place where the field can be set is in the constructor). Then you need to define the backing field and mark it readonly as this isn't supported by auto-implemented properties:

private readonly int foo;

public int Foo
{
    get { return foo; }
}