Private 'set' in C# - having trouble wrapping my brain around it

Question

I\'ve seen a lot of example code written using something like (please forgive how horribly canned this is):

public class Test
{
   public object Thingy { get; pr         


        

Answer 1

This would be if you have a property that you don't want anyone to set but your class. This can be handy with database id's. The internal class can set it but you wouldn't want anyone else changing it. So you can give them read access but not write.

EDIT: One more point on this is that using what you showed there is helpful for automatic properties. Unfortunately with automatic properties you are unable to only specify get so to avoid exposing a setter publicly it is just made private.

EDIT: Just thought I would throw in an example. Automatic properties are great for clean, terse code. But like you showed there is a limitation in that you have to have get and set. So before it was like this for a property like you showed:

public class Test
{
   private object thingy;
   public object Thingy
   {
      get { return thingy; }
   }
}

Now we can get rid of that unneeded private declaration but it requires both. So make private to get around that.

I know this was overkill on the explanation but different things kept popping in my head.