Why are my auto-implemented properties working in ASP.NET 2.0?

Question

I'm using the auto-implemented properties syntax in the C# source files of my ASP.NET Web Application:

public int IdUser { get; set; }
...
this.IdUser = 1;

The Target framework of the project is .NET Framework 2.0. It compile and seems to run properly on a IIS Server with only ASP.NET 2.0 installed. I use Visual Studio 2010 to develop and compile.

I understood this syntax came with .NET 3.
Did I miss a setting somewhere in VS ? Can I expect trouble deploying the website on a IIS/ASP.NET 2.0 server ?

Answer 1

Auto-implemented properties were introduced in .NET 3.0 but are backwards compatible with 2.0. That's why you can run your code on 2.0 framework. Basically, it's just a syntactic sugar and the compiler actually generates a field for you behind the scenes.

Answer 2

Automatically implemented properties works in .NET 2.0, but you won't be able to compile code in Visual Studio 2005. There is a list of 3.0 features and their compatibility with 2.0

http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/Chapter1/Versions.aspx

Answer 3

You can only run .NET 3.0/3.5 features on a server that has just .NET 2.0 if you're using a web application or a precompiled site, rather than a Visual Studio "web site," since the latter is compiled on the server, where the former are compiled by Visual Studio.

Answer 4

As @Jakub said, it is backwards compatible. For example you can also use implicitly declared variables (var i = 1; //i is int), though they were also only introduced in C#3.0!