11.1.Overview of Properties
Properties provide the opportunity to protect a field in a class by reading and writing to it through the property. In other languages, this is often accomplished by programs implementing specialized getter and setter methods. C# properties enable this type of protection while also letting you access the property just like it was a field.
Another benefit of properties over fields is that you can change their internal implementation over time. With a public field, the underlying data type must always be the same because calling code depends on the field being the same. However, with a property, you can change the implementation. For example, if a customer has an ID that is originally stored as an int, you might have a requirements change that made you perform a validation to ensure that calling code could never set the ID to a negative value. If it was a field, you would never be able to do this, but a property allows you to make such a change without breaking code. Now, lets see how to use properties.