Comments on: C#: Public fields vs automatic properties

By: Matthijs

Matthijs — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:36:27 +0000

Properties can be included in an interface, fields cannot.

By: L

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:40:51 +0000

Sorry – I meant “public struct Rect” in the previous example.

By: L

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:11:21 +0000

public class Rect
{
public int Width {get;set;}
public int Height {get;set;}
}

public class A
{
public Rect Rect {get;set;}
}

….
A obj = new A();

// can’t do this in C#
// (you could if Rect was a public data member)
a.Rect.Width = 10;

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:37:03 +0000

You can’t use INotifyPropertyChanged on a public field.

By: Rishi

Rishi — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:18:24 +0000

The other difference as of now is that we can’t initialize automatic properties with values – the opposite is true with public fields. I believe in the .NET 4 the are gonna allow initializing automatic properties. And one of the other difference is in usage by various serialization formatters, such as the default XML serializer does not automatically serialize public fields. And lastly, a number of useful attributes are normally not allowable on fields.

By: Jason Kemp

Jason Kemp — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:21:17 +0000

Only properties, automatic or regular, work with things like data binding in WinForms and WPF.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:12:56 +0000

You can also use

public string Bar { get; private set; }

And when you later want to implement extra logic it won’t break IL code that references the property.

By: Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #280

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #280 — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:20:39 +0000

[...] C#: Public fields vs automatic properties – Mark Needham talks briefly about the differences between fields and automatic properties. Some good comments on this post too [...]

By: James Gregory

James Gregory — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:31:10 +0000

Just to clarify something, automatic properties are the same as standard properties as far as reflection is concerned; automatic properties are just syntactic sugar and produce the same IL as regular properties.

By: James Webster

James Webster — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:29:23 +0000

Field and properties are also treated differently at the level of reflection; there isn’t one method on Type that will return both fields AND properties (other than GetMemberInfo I expect, which will return events and methods as well).

So going down the the automatic property route may deal with reflection difficulties (eg. NHibernate or your own serialisation framework may only handle properties perhaps?)