Why should I avoid using Properties in C#?

Question

In his excellent book, CLR Via C#, Jeffrey Richter said that he doesn\'t like properties, and recommends not to use them. He gave some reason, but I don\'t really understand

Answer 1

I can't help picking on the details of Jeffrey Richter's opinions:

A property may be read-only or write-only; field access is always readable and writable.

Wrong: Fields can marked read-only so only the object's constructor can write to them.

A property method may throw an exception; field access never throws an exception.

Wrong: The implementation of a class can change the access modifier of a field from public to private. Attempts to read private fields at runtime will always result in an exception.

Answer 2

I don't see any reasons why you shouldn't use Properties in general.

Automatic properties in C# 3+ only simplify syntax a bit (a la syntatic sugar).