Windows Forms 2.0 Programming

15. Settings Some Windows Forms applications can happily operate in a microcosm, but most real-world applications rely on information from the environment around them. This information can come from many sources and is dictated by an applica...

The Application Environment During its lifetime, an application runs in a certain environment composed of networks, servers, operating systems, and users. Information about the myriad aspects of this environment is exposed from a combination of co...

Application, User, and Roaming-User Settings Although applications can acquire any number of environmental settings, there are two basic groups of settings that the environment can't provide. First, there are application settings, whic...

Strongly Typed Settings Every settings file added to a VS05 project is used to generate an additional strongly typed settings class.[11] The class has the same name as the settings file, minus the extension. The class is stored in a .Designer.cs...

Using Strongly Typed Settings Thanks in large part to its ApplicationSettingsBase ancestor, the strongly typed class that's generated by the Designer for your settings files dramatically simplifies reading and writing settings, rollbac...

Designer Settings To this point, we've used the Settings Designer to manage settings configuration. However, VS05, the Settings Designer, and the Windows Forms Designer offer several other designer features to simplify settings development.[15][15...

Alternative Storage for Settings The settings system offered by Windows Forms is comprehensive, but there are alternative data stores you may need to consider, including the Registry and special folders. The Registry The Registry was the place...

Where Are We? The core of the environmental settings you'll likely need is broadly provided by four classes: Application, Environment, SystemInformation, and Screen. When system information is changed, the SystemEvents class offers a variety of ev...