Why static automatic properties is only useful in which the getter is public and setter is private

Question

In book <<c# in depth>>, I have read a sentence "The only scenario in which I can see static automatic properties being useful is where the getter is public and setter is private, and the setter is only called whithin the type initializer". I am not sure what's Jon skeet suggested here.

In my opinion both getter and setter can be used as private or public.

Answer 1

The point is that static members should generally be thread-safe... and automatically-implemented properties aren't thread-safe, in terms of any guarantee that a value written by one thread will be immediately visible to another. You can't change that within an automatic property, so the only times a static automatic property are useful are:

• If you don't care about thread safety
• If the setter is private and only set from the static initializer (which is thread-safe automatically). In this case I'd usually just have a readonly static variable and a getter-only property to expose it anyway.

To be honest, settable static properties are pretty unusual (in well-designed code) to start with, even without the thread safety aspect.