Do private classes need to be accessed by properties?

Question

I am using an instance of a private class as the state object supplied to a stream.BeginRead operation. (The class is private to my main stream reading/writing class.)

public class MainClass
{
    // ...

    private class ResponseState
    {
        public IResponse response;
        public Stream stream;
        public byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
    }
}

Access to the class is via the fields directly. Should I really be providing access to the class via properties in this case, even though it is only to be used for holding state?

Interested to know what others do.

Answer 1

I would - encapsulation is useful inside the class as well as outside the class. By funneling all access to a member through a well know interface (i.e. the property) you are giving yourself the flexibility to add logic around that access later without changing calling code.

It may seem like overkill but honestly, given automatically implemented properties, it is so easy to declare a property that you may as well go ahead and use one to give yourself maximum flexibility.