C# return a variable as read only from get; set;

Question

I swear I have seen an example of this but have been googling for a bit and can not find it.

I have a class that has a reference to an object and need to have a GET; met

Answer 1

No, there's no way of doing this. For instance, if you return a List (and it's not immutable) then callers will be able to add entries.

The normal way round this is to return an immutable wrapper, e.g. ReadOnlyCollection.

For other mutable types, you may need to clone the value before returning it.

Note that just returning an immutable interface view (e.g. returning IEnumerable instead of List) won't stop a caller from casting back to the mutable type and mutating.

EDIT: Note that apart from anything else, this kind of concern is one of the reasons why immutable types make it easier to reason about code :)