Access level of property in Private Class

Question

For Private Class, should i declare my property As Public Or Friend (internal in c#)? My Private Class is not accessible by any other classes except it parent class.

Answer 1

In general, try to keep your encapsulation intact. The relationship between your classes should be on "Need to know" basis.

Since I am not familiar with your application design,I am sure I am oversimplifying, but I would ask myself the following question:

• Is the parent class the only class that needs to know the subclass? if so, It should be private.

• If not, are all other entities that needs to about know the subclass are in the same project? if so, It should be internal.

• If there are entities external to the project that needs to know about the subclass, it should be public.

As to the properties. If you decided to have the subclass private, there is no use in making the properties public.
The only object that can have an instance of the class is the parent class, which is in the same project, and therefore internal should be enough for the properties.

Note
C# does not have a friend modifier. Instead of that you can use internal,or The-most similar-yet-less-elegant option: InternalsVisibleTo

Answer 2

Since you class (Nested one) is private the only one who can access it is its container (the base or parent class). In this case public or internal (Friend in VB) doesn't make any difference, since the only one who can access the nested class is it's parent. In general, if some day you want to change the access modifier to public then its good to foresee it now and choose between internal and public. Its simple, if you want members of your nested class to be seen only inside the assembly where it defined, then use internal otherwise consider using public.