Class Properties

[thav]

I just need a better explanation for dummies you can say. I'm reading a book and its making no sense to me. And I keep getting a:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.StackOverflowException' occurred


Properties are for encapsulating correct? Using the set, get, return.

An example is this;


The Person class should be abstract and have a private field named myName


so I wrote this.

public abstract class Person
{
private string myName;

//create property
public string Name
{
get
{
return Name;
}

set
{
Name = value;
}
}
}

and in my Main( )

I wrote this;

Student s = new Student();
s.Name = "Tweety Bird";

to get that. Any help or explain to me properties a little better. Thanks!

[Ganon11]

Is this in C#? It doesn't look like any C or C++ code to me.

Regardless, I believe your function is declared improperly. Get and Set are terms that programmers use to name similar functions, but they are not keywords in most languages. Instead of writing get {...} and set {...} inside the same function, you should write two separate functions - one called getName (returning a String) and one called setName (to set the String).

[nmadct]

This is clearly C#, not C/C++. The get/set keywords are used to declare properties in C#. I see a problem with this code:

 set
{
    Name = value;
}
 

This is invalid since Name is the name of the property. The property itself cannot have a value, in reality it is just a pair of functions that are tied together by a common name and data type. You need to declare another variable to store the value. Usually this is done like this:

private string _name;
public string Name {
    get { return _name; }
    set { _name = value; }
}
 

The get/set methods act as "gatekeepers" for the private value of _name. The strength of this approach is that you can add extra functionality into those methods to do anything you want when the property is fetched or changed.