 <p>It's just syntactic sugar -- the compiler inserts the backing field for you. The effect is the same, except that, of course, there's no way for you to access the backing field from your code.</p> <p>From the page you linked to:</p> <blockquote> <p>When you declare a property as shown in the following example, the compiler creates a private, anonymous backing field that can only be accessed through the property's get and set accessors.</p> </blockquote>