Develop Reference

Is there a way to set a certain property for all controls in a form at once in the Designer?

I want to set a certain property (Anchor) of all the controls in my main form at once.
There are around 100 controls and I really don't want to change this property for each single control manually.
I know I can select all available controls at once by typing Ctrl + A. The problem then occuring is that the desired property I want to change is not visible in the Properties window. And normally it should be visible because all the controls are a type of Control, shouldn't it?
I also know that I could do it like this:
foreach(Control ctrl in myForm.Controls)
{
ctrl.Anchor = AnchorStyle.Bottom;
}
But I want to know if thers's a way of doing this using the Designer. Is there any?

Usually if controls derive from the same base, you can select them all at once (using the mouse click and drag or holding down ctrl or shift while selecting them one by one), and then you can set any property that they all share from the base class.

You can multi-select all controls on the form and see the Anchor property in the Property Grid. When you edit that with multiple controls selected, each selected control will be set to the Anchor value you specify.
But be careful with Ctrl-A--it will select visual controls as well as non-visual components. So if you have any components on your form that don't render in the client area of the form (such as the Timer or FolderBrowserDialog form components), the Ctrl-A will continue to show common properties--but because these components don't have an Anchor property, the Anchor property won't appear. The only properties to appear when multiple controls on a form are selected are those share by all selected controls.

Drawing control from Control.Controls in C# Windows Forms

Good day. How to add user control to another user control without using the Control.Controls property? For example, draw a Button on the MyControl : Control object, that the events of button be available? I want to create MyControl that contains another controls, but the Control.Controls collection must be empty, as in all standard WinForms controls.

When you add control to MyControl, it will be something like
this.Controls.Add(control);
otherwise control is not displayed. So you can not avoid this.
What is the problem to have controls in Controls ? Standard controls are not composed from other controls (there are exceptions though: DataGridView in edit mode and PropertyGrid, maybe more).
However you can use dirty tricks, like:
add control to a parent, wiring up necessary events to MyControl;
mimic control (to example, Label, by outputting text in OnPaint event).
Wouldn't it be much easier to fight with that what has problem with Controls (if there is actually any problem) ?

Create PreRender event for user control

I have created a .ascx user control, with 5 buttons (Add,Edit,Delete,Save,Cancel)
I want to create a Prerender Event for this control, accessible from the Parent Page, such that on postbacks in the Parent Page, I can Show/Hide some of these buttons dependant on a Session Variable.
I have searched Google and DevEx, and don't see quite what I need.

You should avoid having the parent page reach too deeply into the child page. Instead, add some public bool properties to the user control. Have the parent page set these properties to indicate what should be made visible. Then your control can make them visible during the PreRender event of the control.

Prevent User Control's constituent controls from appearing in the controls collection

I have a control that contains another control. This child control is constructed and then displayed on the parent control by adding it to the parent's Controls collection.
However, this results in the consumers of the parent control being able to directly access the child control's properties.
How can I prevent this?
I did try hiding the Controls property but all you need do to avoid that is cast the parent control to type Control and the Controls property is accessible again. Unfortunately the Controls property doesn't appear to be virtual either.
I just seems a little odd, from an encapsulation point of view, to allow everyone external consumer access to the internals of the control.

increase User control size while re-sizing Form

I have an application based on two user controls and one form. This form is parent to my 2 user controls and i pragmatically add them to the form. My issue here is that when anchor components in the user control, they are not anchored in the form. So when re-sizing the form by dragging one of the corners, it seems like the user control does not also get re-sized. I was told that i had to listen to the Forms size and append that size to the User control. Is that a good solution? if yes how would i do that?
My user controls are inserted in a tab component btw.
This is my code for adding the user controls to the form. (if it is needed)
public void addUC(UserControl control, TabPage tab)
{
control.Parent = tab;
}
can anyone help ?

You might want to anchor the child usercontrols using the Anchor property.

If there are only 2 use controls in the form why not use dock - it will always stretch the use control to the maximum size of the form