Yochay Kiriaty

During my C# 3.0 deep dive session in the Developer Academy II, I presented a new syntactic sugar feature in C# 3.0 called Auto Implemented Properties. The Auto Implemented Properties allow us to take regular properties fields that looks like this

//Simple C# 2.0 (.NET Framework 2.0) property decleration

    private string customerID;

    public string CustomerID

    {

        get { return customerID; }

        set { customerID = value; }

    }

And simply write this one line of code:

// C#3.0 Feature:  Auto-Implemented Properties

public string CustomerID { set; get; }

The compiler, behind the scenes creates the supporting backing field named CustomerID and also creates the default set & get supporting methods. Using Reflector to check the compiler output you will see this:

Note the default setters and getters generated by the compiler and a default constructor.

If you want to modify the values in the SET function operation or make format manipulation at the GET function operation you will need to use the old syntax.

So you can see that this only a compiler feature, a trick, no magic nor new code, it is just shorter code that is easy to read and maintain.