John, I didn't say that there was nothing new about them - just that you could have done all that before all the functionality you've mentioned could be achieved using a protected property and a SETProp GETProp methods (which essentially what the ACCESS and ASSIGN methods are I didn't even say ASSIGN and ACCESS are useless,I like and use them alot - as they provide a much cleaner interface to accomplish those things Arnon > >>>there is nothing you can do with Access and Assign that you couldn't do >>>earlier > >This is not really correct. For example: > >1. With access methods, you can have read-only properties. >2. With assign methods, you can enforce data types and specific values. >3. With access methods, you can have dynamically generated values >4. With both, you can create collection classes that behave more like >generic collections. > > >True, you could do all of this with methods - but not with properties. So, to say that there is nothing new - is not true.