Properly exposing a List?

Question

I know I shouldn\'t be exposing a List in a property, but I wonder what the proper way to do it is? For example, doing this:

public static          


        

Answer 1

You don't need to worry about the overhead of cloning: wrapping a collection with a ReadOnlyCollection does not clone it. It just creates a wrapper; if the underlying collection changes, the readonly version changes also.

If you worry about creating fresh wrappers over and over again, you can cache it in a separate instance variable.