Encapsulation C# newbie

Question

New to C#, and I understand that encapsulation is just a way of \"protecting data\". But I am still unclear. I thought that the point of get and set accessors wer

Answer 1

Indeed, creating an auto-property as follows:

public string Name { get; set; }

is identical to building a property backed by a field:

private string _name;
public string Name {
    get { return _name; }
    set { _name = value; }
}

The point of these properties is not to hide data. As you observed, they don't do this. Instead, these properties can do other stuff instead of just working with a field:

public string Name {
    get { return _name; }
    set { if (value == null) throw new Exception("GTFO!"); _name = value; }
}

Another thing is, you can make properties virtual:

public virtual string Name { get; set; }

which, if overridden, can provide different results and behaviours in a derived class.