Keep Your Fields Private
Background A recent discussion about this spurred a bit of a debate. Ever since I can remember, I've always been told to keep fields private. If you want to expose them any more than private you should use a property. Of course, I was defending my stance on this and figured I should see what other people were saying. I turned to the trusty Stack Overflow (SO) for some answers. Argument For: Control One of the major categories of arguments for keeping fields private has to do with control. Some great points brought up by SO posters included that properties allow you to easily add verification to your data storage. With a field inside of your class, your control is over how this variable is manipulated is constrained to the class. As soon as you expose something outside of the class,…
