Getters setters and properties best practices. Java vs. C

Questions

I m taking a C# class right now and I m trying to find out the best way of doing things. I come from a Java background and so I m only familiar with Java best-practices; I m a C# novice!

In Java if I have a private property, I do this;

private String name;

public void setName(String name) {
   this.name = name;
}

public String getName() {
   return this.name;
}

In C#, I see that there are many ways of doing this.

I can do it like Java:

private string name;

public void setName(string name) {
   this.name = name;
}

public string getName() {
   return this.name;
}

Or I can do it this way:

private string name;

public string Name {
   get { return name; }
   set { name = value; }
}

Or:

public string Name { get; set; }

Which one should I use, and what are the caveats or subtleties involved with each approach? When creating classes, I am following general best-practices that I know from Java (especially reading Effective Java). So for example, I am favoring immutability (providing setters only when necessary). I m just curious to see how these practices fit in with the various ways of providing setters and getters in C#; essentially, how would I translate best-practices from the Java world into C#?

  EDIT   

I was posting this as a comment to Jon Skeet s answer but then it got long:

What about a non-trivial property (i.e., with significant processing and validation perhaps)? Could I still expose it via a public property but with the logic encapsulated in get and set? Why would/should I do this over having dedicated setter and getter methods (with associated processing and validation logic).

Answers

  Pre-C# 6   

I d use the last of these, for a trivial property. Note that I d call this a public property as both the getters and setters are public.

Immutability is a bit of a pain with automatically implemented properties - you can t write an auto-property which only has a getter; the closest you can come is:

public string Foo { get; private set; }

which isn t really immutable... just immutable outside your class. So you may wish to use a real read-only property instead:

private readonly string foo;
public string Foo { get { return foo; } }

You definitely don t want to write getName() and setName(). In some cases it makes sense to write Get/Set methods rather than using properties, particularly if they could be expensive and you wish to emphasize that. However, you d want to follow the .NET naming convention of PascalCase for methods, and you wouldn t want a trivial property like this to be implemented with normal methods anyway - a property is much more idiomatic here.

  C# 6   

Hooray, we finally have proper read-only automatically implemented properties:

// This can only be assigned to within the constructor
public string Foo { get; }

Likewise for read-only properties which do need to do some work, you can use member-bodied properties:

public double Area => height * width;

Source

License : cc by-sa 3.0

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4948816/getters-setters-and-properties-best-practices-java-vs-c-sharp

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