In the realm of programming, it’s a widespread practice to design types that provide access to collections of data. However, upon reviewing various codebases, a recurring pattern often emerges:

public List<Range> Ranges 
{
    get; set;
}

The problem at hand revolves around the mutability of a property, which opens the door to potentially replacing the entire collection—a practice discouraged by Microsoft. To align with best practices, it’s advisable to provide a method for replacing the collection instead of making the property writable.

To rectify this, you can either remove the setter altogether or opt for the init modifier, as exemplified below:

public List<Range> Ranges => _ranges;

Both binary and XML serialization support read-only properties containing collections.

This is related to violation CA2227 and this is how I have it setup in my .editorConfig: dotnet_diagnostic.CA2227.severity = warning

Summary

While reviewing the codebase I utilized for this article, I discovered 103 occurrences where the code needs to be fixed.

For further guidance and insights, I highly recommend obtaining a copy of my book, “Rock Your Code: Coding Standards for Microsoft .NET” available on Amazon.com. Additionally, to explore more performance tips for .NET, I encourage you to acquire the 3rd edition of “Rock Your Code: Code & App Performance for Microsoft .NET” also available on Amazon.com.

To analyze your code using the same settings I used in these articles, I encourage you to incorporate my EditorConfig file. It can be found at the following link: https://bit.ly/dotNetDaveEditorConfig. I update this file quarterly, so remember to keep yours up to date as well. I hope you will check out my OSS project Spargine by using this link: https://bit.ly/Spargine.

Please feel free to leave a comment below. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback.

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