C# 3.0 Features: Automatic Properties
NET 3.5 is out which means all of the great features available in C# 3.0 are available to use now. Here's a quick list of the main language enhancements available in C# 3.0:
One of the things I can't say that I've enjoyed doing in the past when writing .NET classes was creating properties and associated fields. I leveraged the "prop" code snippet a lot in Visual Studio 2005 so that I didn't have to type much, but I still had to go through and define the field name and property name in the code. While public fields could certainly be used in some cases, they don't provide any control over the data being assigned (especially if the field is a string type) and aren't supported well when it comes to data binding. As a result I always create public properties to wrap fields even if I don't have any "extra" logic that needs added into the get or set blocks. Here's the standard way of creating fields and properties using C# 2.0:
public class Person
{
string _FirstName;
string _LastName;
public string FirstName
{
get
{
return _FirstName;
}
set
{
_FirstName = value;
}
}
public string LastName
{
get
{
return _LastName;
}
set
{
_LastName = value;
}
}
}
With C# 3.0 a new feature called "automatic properties" is now available. When you use the "prop" code snippet in Visual Studio 2008 you'll see that empty get and set blocks are added and that no associated field is added into the code. The compiler will automatically generate the backing field at compile time if it finds empty get or set blocks saving you the work. You can still add get and set blocks that have additional filtering logic in them as well although you'll have to type all of that yourself of course.
Here's an example of how properties can be written in C# 3.0....you gotta love it especially when you compare how much more compact this technique is compared to the older way of doing things.
public class Person
{
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
Happy Programming
posted by .NET team @ 3:30 PM
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