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Source Code

The ImplicitlyTypedLocalVars project can be found under the Chapter 13 subdirectory.

Understanding Automatic Properties

As you learned in Chapter 5 during our examination of encapsulation services, .NET programming

languages prefer the use of type properties to safely obtain and assign private data fields of a type,

rather than using traditional GetXXX() and SetXXX() methods. Consider the following encapsulated

string type:

// A Car type using standard property

// syntax.

class Car

{

private string carName = string.Empty;

public int PetName

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{

get { return carName; }

set { carName = value; }

}

}

While defining a C# property is not too problematic, you may agree that when your properties

simply assign and return the value straightaway as you see here, it is rather verbose to define back-

ing fields and simple property definitions multiple times. By way of an example, if you are modeling

a type that requires 15 private points of field data, you end up authoring 15 related properties that

are little more than thin wrappers for encapsulation services.

To streamline the process of providing simple encapsulation of field data, C# 2008 now pro-

vides 

automatic property syntax. As the name implies, this feature will offload the work of defining a

private backing field and the related C# property member to the compiler using a new bit of syntax.

To illustrate, under C# 2008, the previous Car type could now be defined as follows:

class Car

{