How should I use properties when dealing with read-only List members

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You can expose it AsReadOnly. That is, return a read-only IList<T> wrapper. For example …

public ReadOnlyCollection<int> List
{
    get { return _lst.AsReadOnly(); }
}

Just returning an IEnumerable<T> is not sufficient. For example …

void Main()
{
    var el = new ExposeList();
    var lst = el.ListEnumerator;
    var oops = (IList<int>)lst;
    oops.Add( 4 );  // mutates list

    var rol = el.ReadOnly;
    var oops2 = (IList<int>)rol;

    oops2.Add( 5 );  // raises exception
}

class ExposeList
{
  private List<int> _lst = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };

  public IEnumerable<int> ListEnumerator
  {
     get { return _lst; }
  }

  public ReadOnlyCollection<int> ReadOnly
  {
     get { return _lst.AsReadOnly(); }
  }
}

Steve’s answer also has a clever way to avoid the cast.

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