Are private fields needed in a class where no methods exist?

I've been using ReSharper to do some work on cleaning up a C# codebase. I had been using both private fields in model classes along with public properties. However, I'm finding that I can simply take the properties that have no backing fields and convert them into auto-properties. These are model classes; no methods exist within them to impact the data in the objects. Is it better to just use the auto-properties?

EDIT: Including example of "Backing fields"

public class Gizmo
{
    //this is what I call the "backing" field, only because it's "behind" the
    //publicly-accessible property and you access it through the property
    private Int32 _count;

    //and this is the property, of course
    public Int32 Count
    {
        get { return _count; }
        set { _count = value; }
    }
}
Jon Skeet
people
quotationmark

Methods are irrelevant here. If you have a property of:

private int foo;
public int Foo
{
    get { return foo; }
    set { foo = value; }
}

Then it absolutely makes sense to turn that into:

public int Foo { get; set; }

If any other code uses the private field, you can just change it to use the property instead.

people

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