Private Set or Private member?

Question

I was wondering what\'s considered the C# best practice, private/protected members with public getters, or public getters with private/protected setters?

Answer 1

In my opinion there is no best practice and very little (if any) difference in the resulting compiled code, it really just depends on your needs or own likes/dislikes. If you're following your group's naming standards and meeting requirements (e.g. don't need to propagate a change notification) then it shouldn't matter.

An advantage of private fields is that you can define a default value in the same place as your declaration. In an auto-implemented property you'll have do define the default in the constructor if it's not null or the type's default value.

However, I still like private setters. But we usually don't use auto-implemented properties since our setters usually have a richer functionality - e.g. property update notifications, logging, etc.