Is implementing a singleton using an auto-property a good idea?

Question

I recently found out about auto-properties and like them quite a lot. At this moment I am trying to use them everywhere where I can. Not really to just be able to use them e

Answer 1

I wouldn't personally do that. I don't like using automatically implemented properties with a private setter that you never call where really you want a read-only property backed by a read-only variable. It's only one more line of code to be more explicit about what you mean:

public sealed class MySingleton
{
    private static readonly MySingleton mySingleton;
    public static MySingleton MySingleton { get { return mySingleton; } }

    private MySingleton() {}

    static MySingleton() { mySingleton = new MySingleton(); }
}

This way no-one's even tempted to change the singleton class to reassign either the property or the variable, because the compiler will stop them. They'd have to add a setter and/or make the variable non-readonly, which is a bigger change - one which hopefully they'd reconsider.

In other words:

• Yes, it will work.
• No, I don't think it's a good idea.

As of C# 6, this is easier with read-only automatically implemented properties though:

public sealed class MySingleton
{
    public static MySingleton MySingleton { get; } = new MySingleton();    
    private MySingleton() {}         
    static MySingleton() {}
}