Properties (Getters & Setters)

Properties are how C# lets us safely access and change the data inside a class. They control how data is read and updated, while keeping the actual fields protected.

So far our fields have been public, which means anything can change them to anything, including nonsense like a negative age. From now on, our fields will be private, meaning they cannot be touched directly from outside the class. Instead we expose them through properties. This is part of a principle called encapsulation: keeping your data safe and only allowing changes that make sense.

If you've used other languages, you may have written getName() and setName() methods. C# has a cleaner, built-in feature for this called properties, and that's what we use instead.

Properties - A

Here's a Person class with a private field name and a public property Name that controls access to it.