C# question

[mikeh]

i know how this feels... learned programming 20 years ago myself and now i find myself in this beatiful world of objects ....

often wondering if all these techniques are really making things so much more efficient or are we only kidding ourselves... never mind, i´m digressing

The property syntax in .NET is just sugar over a normal method(s) that you would write access the private variable in the class. You could just as well write to methods, GetShowArrows and SetShowArrows to get and set the value, but now we have this language feature that is the convention.

When I'm programming I usually access the variable directly inside the class for simplicity, unless there is code in one of the property methods that is performing an action. It's likely the compiler resolves away the overhead of a method call, so there probably isn't a difference in performance. In .Net 3.5, you can completely skip the declaration of the variable and just write the property methods, and the compiler will insert the variable for you. Saves an extra line of typing!