Accessing members in your own class: use (auto)properties or not?

Question

I\'ve created this \"question\" as a community-wiki, because there is no right or wrong answer. I only would like to know how the community feels about this specific issue.

Answer 1

99% of the time I use the property rather then the instance variable. In the past, I've worked with a lot of code that used the instance variable and when there was a bug associated with that variable, I had to put a breakpoint on every line of code that referenced it.

I decided to use properties instead, either public or private, to wrap around the instance variable. Doing this means that I only have to put a breakpoint in the getter/setter of the property if I need to debug an issue with the instance variable, rather then having (potentially) a lot of breakpoints scattered all over the code.