CodeSOD: Protect Your Property

Given the common need to have getter/setter methods on properties, many languages have adopted conventions which try and make it easier to implement/invoke them. For example, if you name a method foo in Ruby, you can invoke it by doing: obj.foo = 5.

In the .NET family of languages, there's a concept of a property, which bundles the getter and setter methods together through some syntactical sugar. So, something like this, in VB.Net.

 Public Property Foo() as Boolean Get return _foo End Get Set(val as Boolean) _foo = val end Set End Property

Now, you can do obj.Foo = FILE_NOT_FOUND, which actually invokes the Set method.

You can have more fun- the Property declaration can be marked as ReadOnly, and then you can skip the Set portion, or you can mark it as WriteOnly and skip the Get portion.

Dave S was given some time to pay down existing technical debt, and went hunting for bad code. He found this unusual way of making a property read only:

 hfRequiredDocsPresent = CBool(hfAllDocumentsUploaded.Value) Public Property hfRequiredDocsPresent() As Boolean Get Return CBool(hfAllDocumentsUploaded.Value) End Get Set(ByVal value As Boolean) value = CBool(hfAllDocumentsUploaded.Value) End Set End Property

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