What is the difference between Environment.CurrentDirectory and Directory.GetCurrentDirectory?

Question

In .NET what is the difference between:

• Environment.CurrentDirectory
• Directory.GetCurrentDirectory()?

Of course, Environment.CurrentDirectory is a property which can be set and obtained.

Are there any other differences?

Answer 1

As David says: they do the same thing. Internally, when getting Environment.CurrentDirectory it will call Directory.GetCurrentDirectory and when setting Environment.CurrentDirectory it will call Directory.SetCurrentDirectory.

Just pick a favorite and go with it.

Answer 2

As per other answers, there is no difference - the implemenetation of Environment.CurrentDirectory delegates to the Get and Set methods in Directory.

There's an interesting stylistic API-design question that that raises - why did the designers of Environment feel that a regular property was appropriate, whereas the designers of Directory preferred explicit Get and Set methods?

The Framework Design Guidelines book has a fair amount to say about choosing properties versus methods, some of which is available online. The most relevant parts seem to me to be (with my emphases):

A rule of thumb is that methods should represent actions and properties should represent data. Properties are preferred over methods if everything else is equal

...

• CONSIDER using a property, if the member represents a logical attribute of the type

...

• DO use a method, rather than a property, in the following situations:
  • The operation is orders of magnitude slower than a field access would be

All things considered my opinion is that explicit Get and Set methods better represent what is going on here.