Accessing property within a property

You can access a property within a property because that property User, that implements IPrincipal, has a method Identity that returns an object that implements the IIdentity interface. So each time you operate on the return value of that property. It would technically not matter whether a property or method was used to return the object instance. If User.Identity.isAuthenticated() would be User.GetIdentity().isAuthenticated() it could also work fine, although it would be somewhat more strange to read.

So, because the property is of a certain class you can immediately start calling properties and methods when you access them. Like httpcontext.User.Identity.isAuthenticated() returns a boolean, but to store it as a string you can also do this httpcontext.User.Identity.isAuthenticated().toString() without any problems.

Good luck!

It's simple: think of each class as a box.

Each box can be opened, and contains various drawers - each draw is a property of the box.

If you put a box (SmallBox) inside the drawer of another box (BigBox):

BigBox myBigBox = new BigBox();
myBigBox.DrawerSeven.Box = new SmallBox(nameOfSmallBox);

Then you would access it's drawers as:

SmallBox mySmallBox = myBigBox.DrawerSeven.Box;
string s = mySmallBox.DrawerFour.Name;

You could combine these and say:

string s = myBigBox.DrawerSeven.Box.DrawerFour.Name;

and get the same result.

Box is a property of DrawerSeven, which is a property of BigBox.
Name is a property of DrawerFour, which is a property of SmallBox.

A property can be an object, itself having properties...

The context of what you think as of "inside property" has absolutely nothing special compared to other places where you write your code. As I can understand, you're talking about the code "inside" a property getter or setter (because — what else?). So, you can do whatever you need. This includes accessing some other property of the same or any other type.

—SA