The sync tool I use most often on windows is SyncBackSE - it will even let you keep n-versions while running in the background. The free version is great - the pro version is fantastic (but rarely required unless your boss has a _very large_ set of files to backup).

The only good example of a write-only property I've come across is with authentication. A class representing a user might have a username and a password. The password is required for authentication, but should not be generally accessible to the rest of an application. If you have a code-base which supports third-party plug-in authoring then you may not be able to guarantee all plug-in code is safe / responsible... In this case a write-only property for the class is a good plan if the user object is then shared. Otherwise I would tend to agree with the use of a setter method... Might be a background thing, though :cool: - I know a lot of the VB folks like properties for class field setters/getters.

AJ

Sometimes using compound string keys is the only way to maintain data between multiple systems / instances where there is no shared system key (and no reason to force such a situation). That said, you would hope the individual elements which were used to generate the keys are available as individual columns also to give good performance for queries...

AJ