ScottGu blogged some time ago, among other interesting things, about the difference between public fields and public properties.

I had always seen comments about the convenience of using public properties instead of public fields, but I hadn’t seen a real explanation until now. I tought, “why should I bother writing a getter and a setter? If I just use a public Foo field, I can refactor it into a Property if it turns out I have to.” It seems I wan’t the only one that thought this very same thing.

But it turns out there are some differences:

• You can’t databind against a variable.
• Changing a variable to a property is a breaking change. When you change a field to a property you need to re-build all code that used that field.
• Reflection works differently on variables vs. properties, so if you rely on reflection, it’s easier to use all properties.

There are some other relevant points in both posts.
From Jeff’s:

• Distinguishing public and private using only case is an accident waiting to happen. I still don’t have a clear view if I should be using _bar = bar or this.bar = bar.
  
• Is it a property or a method? A property should do less work– a lot less work– than a method. Properties should be lightweight. If your property incurs significant effort, it should be refactored into an explicit method.

From Scott’s, there is some syntactic sugar for C#3 (or is it 3.5?):

Automatic Properties
This cleans up our classes from all the innecesary private fields.

public class Person {
public string FirstName { get; set; }
   public string LastName { get; set; } 
   public int Age { get; set; }
}

Object initializers
Allow you to atomically initialize an object lacking an appropiate constructor. More on this.

Person person = new Person { FirstName="Scott", LastName="Guthrie", Age=32 };

Collection initializers
Same annonymous methods, but applied to collections.

   List people = new List {
    new Person { FirstName = "Scott", LastName = "Guthrie", Age = 32 },
    new Person { FirstName = "Bill", LastName = "Gates", Age = 50 },
    new Person { FirstName = "Susanne", LastName = "Guthrie", Age = 32 }
 };