When to use properties instead of functions

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I tend to use properties if the following are true:

  • The property will return a single, logic value
  • Little or no logic is involved (typically just return a value, or do a small check/return value)

I tend to use methods if the following are true:

  • There is going to be significant work involved in returning the value – ie: it’ll get fetched from a DB, or something that may take “time”
  • There is quite a bit of logic involved, either in getting or setting the value

In addition, I’d recommend looking at Microsoft’s Design Guidelines for Property Usage. They suggest:

Use a property when the member is a logical data member.

Use a method when:

  • The operation is a conversion, such as Object.ToString.
  • The operation is expensive enough that you want to communicate to the user that they should consider caching the result.
  • Obtaining a property value using the get accessor would have an observable side effect.
  • Calling the member twice in succession produces different results.
  • The order of execution is important. Note that a type’s properties should be able to be set and retrieved in any order.
  • The member is static but returns a value that can be changed.
  • The member returns an array. Properties that return arrays can be very misleading. Usually it is necessary to return a copy of the internal array so that the user cannot change internal state. This, coupled with the fact that a user can easily assume it is an indexed property, leads to inefficient code. In the following code example, each call to the Methods property creates a copy of the array. As a result, 2n+1 copies of the array will be created in the following loop.

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