Updating A Private Automatic Property

I had an issue at work today where I was trying to update a public get, private set automatic propety using reflection.

My first issue was I didn't now that when you reflect a type, you can access all the inherited public scoped methods and properties and fields, but you can't access any inherited private methods, properties, and fields. Once I had that figured out, I just had to figure out what the name of the field was.

I downloaded Red Gate's .Net Reflector (an awesome tool) and dissambled my sample test program. I then looked at the property generated by the compiler,

// Fields
[CompilerGenerated]
private long <CustId>k__BackingField;

// Properties
public long CustId

    [CompilerGenerated]
    get
    {
return this.<CustId>k__BackingField;
    }
    private [CompilerGenerated]
    set
    {
        this.<CustId>k__BackingField = value;
    }

And as you can quickly see, the name of the backing field for an automatic property is as follows, k__BackingField. Once I had the backing name figured out, I could update just like any other nonpublic field:

WinPart parent = new WinPart(_mainForm);
parent.GetType().GetField("<CustId>k__BackingField", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance).SetValue(this, newCustId);