You hear that Mr. Anderson?

Auto-Implemented properties are great, until you need to implement custom get or set logic. I love the ability to make the field an implementation detail, until you need to implement the property. What if you could continue to hide the field, like this:

public string FirstName {
  get {
    // do more stuff, like lazy init the field
    if (field == null)
      field = "Unknown";
    return field;
  }
  set {
    field = value;
  }
}

A new keyword, field, references the compiler generated property’s backing field. Also, for readonly fields:

public readonly string Id {
  get {
    return field;
  }
  set { // private is implied
    // do more stuff, like don't accept null
    if (value == null)
      value = string.Empty;
    field = value;
  }
}

Where the property would need to be set in the constructor (like read-only fields) as the backing field would be marked read-only. For simplicity, the implementation would use simple property syntax while the compiled output would involve a read-only field, a truly read-only property and a constructor that executes the property's set body via a static method call each time the field is set in the constructor.

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