#698 – Type Members Are Implicitly Private

You use access modifiers to define the accessibility of members within a class (public, private, protected, internal or protected internal).

If you omit the access modifier entirely, the class member defaults to being private.  This is true for all class members, including constants, fields, properties, methods, indexers, events, constructors and nested types.

In the example below, the Description property, NumDogs static property and the ChaseTail method are all effectively private members, because their declaration does not include an access modifier.

    public class Dog
    {
        // Public properties
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public int Age { get; set; }

        // Implicitly private
        string Description { get; set; }

        // Instance constructor
        public Dog(string name, int age)
        {
            Name = name;
            Age = age;
        }

        // Implicitly private
        static int NumDogs { get; set; }

        // Implicitly private
        void ChaseTail()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("I'm chasing my tail");
        }
    }