Protected Members
Note
This content is reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. from Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries, 2nd Edition. That edition was published in 2008, and the book has since been fully revised in the third edition. Some of the information on this page may be out-of-date.
Protected members by themselves do not provide any extensibility, but they can make extensibility through subclassing more powerful. They can be used to expose advanced customization options without unnecessarily complicating the main public interface.
Framework designers need to be careful with protected members because the name "protected" can give a false sense of security. Anyone is able to subclass an unsealed class and access protected members, and so all the same defensive coding practices used for public members apply to protected members.
✔️ CONSIDER using protected members for advanced customization.
✔️ DO treat protected members in unsealed classes as public for the purpose of security, documentation, and compatibility analysis.
Anyone can inherit from a class and access the protected members.
Portions © 2005, 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. from Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries, 2nd Edition by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, published Oct 22, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional as part of the Microsoft Windows Development Series.