Friday, May 12, 2006

Protected or Private?

As of late, I've been setting the access level on class properties to protected.


I was creating a class, and the protected keyword came up in intellisense and I paused to think. Maybe if a class inherits from this class it would be useful to have access to the member data of the class, the same goes for private methods, why not make them protected?


So, right now, I am generally going with 'protected' for all internal class stuff. Classes that I know will not be extended will have private members, I ensure to seal those classes.


I imagine that a truly carefully designed class has a mix of private, protected and public access levels, and that setting everything internal to 'protected' is a bit naive. but for now...

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