Information Technology Reference
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C# Language Idioms
Why should you change what you are doing today if it works? The answer
is that you can be better. You change tools or languages because you can be
more productive. You don't realize the expected gains if you don't change
your habits. This is harder when the new language, C#, has so much in
common with a familiar language, such as C++ or Java. C# is another curly
braced language, making it easy to fall into the same idioms you used in
other languages in the same family. That will prevent you from getting the
most out of C#. The C# language has evolved since its first commercial
release in 2001. It's now much farther removed from C++ or Java than it
was in its original release. If you are approaching C# from another lan-
guage, you need to learn the C# idioms so that the language works with
you, rather than against you. This chapter discusses the habits that you
should change—and what you should do instead.
Properties have always been first-class citizens in the C# language. Several
enhancements since the 1.0 release of the C# language have made properties
even more expressive. You can specify different access restrictions on the
getter and setter. Implicit properties minimize the hand typing for proper-
ties instead of data members. If you're still creating public variables in your
types, stop now. If you're still creating get and set methods by hand, stop
now. Properties let you expose data members as part of your public inter-
face and still provide the encapsulation you want in an object-oriented
environment. Properties are language elements that are accessed as though
they are data members, but they are implemented as methods.
Some members of a type really are best represented as data: the name of a
customer, the x,y location of a point, or last year's revenue. Properties
enable you to create an interface that acts like data access but still has all
the benefits of a method. Client code accesses properties as though they are
accessing public fields. But the actual implementation uses methods, in
which you define the behavior of property accessors.
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