What are Automatic Properties in C# and what is their purpose?

Question

Could someone provide a very simple explanation of Automatic Properties in C#, their purpose, and maybe some examples? Try to keep things in layman's terms, please!

Answer 1

Automatic Properties are used when no additional logic is required in the property accessors.
The declaration would look something like this:

public int SomeProperty { get; set; } 

They are just syntactic sugar so you won't need to write the following more lengthy code:

 private int _someField;  public int SomeProperty   {     get { return _someField;}     set { _someField = value;}  } 

Answer 2

Edit: Expanding a little, these are used to make it easier to have private variables in the class, but allow them to be visible to outside the class (without being able to modify them)

Oh, and another advantage with automatic properties is you can use them in interfaces! (Which don't allow member variables of any kind)

With normal properties, you can do something like:

private string example; public string Example  {     get { return example; }     set { example = value; } } 

Automatic properties allows you to create something really concise:

public string Example { get; set; } 

So if you wanted to create a field where it was only settable inside the class, you could do:

public string Example { get; private set; } 

This would be equivalent to:

private string example; public string Example  {     get { return example; }     private set { example = value; } } 

Or in Java:

private String example;  public String getExample() {     return example; }  private void setExample(String value) {     example = value; } 

Edit: @Paya also alerted me to:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384054.aspx
• http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/12/04/c-3-0-features-automatic-properties.aspx