Conventions - Pmmlabs/lastfm-sharp2 GitHub Wiki

Conventions

In writing lastfm-sharp I tried to follow the conventions for the difference between properties and methods as much as possible:

• Use a property when the member is a logical data member.
• Use a method when:
• The operation is a conversion, such as Object.ToString.
• The operation is expensive enough that you want to communicate to the user that they should consider caching the result.
• Obtaining a property value using the get accessor would have an observable side effect.
• Calling the member twice in succession produces different results.
• The order of execution is important. Note that a type's properties should be able to be set and retrieved in any order.
• The member is static but returns a value that can be changed.
• The member returns an array. Properties that return arrays can be very misleading. Usually it is necessary to return a copy of the internal array so that the user cannot change internal state. This, coupled with the fact that a user can easily assume it is an indexed property, leads to inefficient code. In the following code example, each call to the Methods property creates a copy of the array. As a result, 2n+1 copies of the array will be created in the following loop.

All the opertaions that require interaction with the Last.fm servers (therefore it requires a little extra time for making contact) have been utilized in methods, while all the operations that return static data are utilized as properties.