One of my favorite bloggers, Eric Lippert , has a great post on the " properties vs. attributes " question. ...classes and structs and interfaces and whatnot are mechanisms that we use to implement model elements that represent the desired semantics in a manner that we as software developers find amenable to our tools . But let's be careful to not confuse the thing being modeled with the mechanisms we use to model it. Technorati Tags: .NET , Properties , Attributes