If you're like me, you like to use the "prop" snippet from Visual Studio 2005. If you don't know what I'm talking about, with a C# file open in Visual Studio 2005 (or 2008), type: prop then hit tab twice. In 2005, you are able to initialize the variable like so:

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

However, in 2008, prop tab tab gives you the following..

public string Name { get; set; }

This is a problem because there's no simple quick way to initialize the variable.
You can initialize it in a constructor, but what if you're using a static class? You're only other option is to use a DefaultValue attribute like so:

[DefaultValue("default")] public string Name { get; set; }

The problem with using the DefaultValue attribute is that, as far as I know, it requires using Reflection. So not only is it a pain to type, you also take a performance hit.

The way that 2005 handled it still works in 2008, so the easiest solution is to use the snippet from 2005 in 2008. I have created a propx snippet to handle just that. Simply unzip and put the propx.snippet file into your My Code Snippets folder (in Windows 7 this is located at C:\Users\Gordon\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets\), restart visual studio then type propx tab tab to use it.

Found out something interesting this morning while writing a copy constructor in C# .NET 2.0 code. Similar to Java, within a class, if you use another reference of the same class within a method of that class, you can directly access private members of that other reference.

An example should show this more clearly. The following function is a copy constructor. I like to use leading underscores for private class members.

public Category(Category cat) { _id = cat._id; _name = cat._name; _description = cat._description; }

As you can see, it is accessing the reference's private members directly.

Why would you want to do this?
What if your public get/set accessor methods return altered values? Being forced to use the get/set methods would not allow a copy constructor to work properly in this case.

This isn't only limited to constructors either, you can do this in any method of the class as long as the reference is the same type. Even static methods. Like I said, this also works in Java.