One of the issues with properties in C#1.x is that the get and the set accessors get the same accessibility. In some situations you'd want to impose more usage restriction on the set accessor then on get . In the following sample both the get and set are public.

class Employee
{
    private string m_name;
    public string Name {
        get { return m_name; }
        set { m_name = value; }
    }
}
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        Employee emp = new Employee();
        emp.Name = "Abhinaba Basu";
    }
}

In case you want set to be more restricted than get you have no direct way of getting it done in C#1.x (other than splitting them into different properties). In C# 2.0 its possible to have different accessibility on get and set accessors using accessor-modifier. The following code gives protected access to set and public to get

class Employee
{
    private string m_name;
    public string Name
    {
        get { return m_name; }
        protected set { m_name = value; }
    }
}
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        Employee emp = new Employee();
        emp.Name = "Abhinaba Basu"; // Will fail to compile
    }
}

This is really cool because in many designs I have felt the need to make set accessor protected and allow get to be internal or public. With this addition to C# this becomes easy to do.

There are however lot of gotchas and cases to consider before going ahead and blindly using this. I have listed some which I found need to be considered....

• Accessor-modifiers cannot be used in an interfaces or explicit interface implementation
• The modifier must be more restrictive than the accessibility of the property. So if the property is declared as protected then the modifier can only be private
• Accessor-modifier does not effect member lookup.

Be sure to check the C# spec before using this feature as there are some subtleties specially in terms of member lookup....