Just a follow-up on my post of yesterday about the intent of exposing a read-write property of an Array/Collection type.

Practical Guidelines and Best Practices has the following guidance (i'm paraphrasing)

13.13 To protect the state of a backing var for properties that return arrays, consider

get { return DirectCast(_arr.Clone(), string()); }

which is good protection, but less efficient.  Or, provide indexed access to the array by an indexed property or function.  Getting close...

13.14 Properties that return a collection should be read-only to prevent clients replacing the whole array with a new one, or with a null reference as that could break assumptions elsewhere in the class. Disco! 

Thanks lads!