Reader Eric O was browsing the source of an API for handling concurrency when he stumbled on a telling mismatch between documentation and reality in a Status property.

The XML doc comment above the property explains earnestly that the status is private: the object itself needs to set it, but consumers should only be allowed to read it, lest everything break. The property declaration directly underneath, however, is public — complete with a public getter and a public setter that merely raises a PropertyChanged notification when the value differs from the backing field _status.

The article concedes that in practice this probably works fine, and the comment will at least appear in the generated documentation, gently hinting that the setter is off-limits. The punchline is the underlying assumption: that consumers of the API will actually read those docs — or care that a plainly public member merely claims to be private.