Here is a quick note about VS2010...there is a built in code snippet, propfull, that you can use to have the IDE create the backing variables for you. In VS2008 I had to use my own code snippet that I called propf. Now that is very cool that VS2010 has the snippet. But a little bit creepy that it is so close to the one I used and it does exactly the same thing!! Also, the nerd+art snippets for creating Dependency Properties in Silverlight/WPF seem to have some new cousins - propdp, and propa.