Best Practice on local use of Private Field x Property

Question

When inside a class you have a private fiels and expose that field on a public property, which one should I use from inside the class?

Below you is an example on what I

Answer 1

In my opinion, using a public accessor internally is over-encapsulation: it blurs the code. With such an approach, otherwise simple operations invoke accessors that may contain more complex logic, so it's harder to analyze the code of the operations.

In my programming experience, I've rarely had a situation when it would help much. Instead, I prefer to access fields directly, and only if it's really needed, to abstract the access by creating a private accessor, which can be used by both the public accessor and other functions. The rationale is that if you need to attach some special logic in the public accessor, chances are that the logic may not be the same for internal access.

Note also that most modern IDEs (like Eclipse) allow to see immediately all references to a private field, and to refactor the code to use a function instead of a direct access.