How can I easily keep consistent UI settings in C# Winform application?

I have a lot of different UserControls and 开发者_如何学Gowould like to maintain consistent UI settings (mainly colors and fonts). My first try was this:

public class UISettings
{
//...
    public void SetupUserControl(ref UserControl ctrl)
    {
        ctrl.BackColor = this.BackColor;
    }
}

to be called in every control like this:

settings.SetupUserControl(ref this);

As this is read-only it cannot be passed by ref argument so this does not work. What are other options to keep consistent UI without manually changing properties for every item?

Inheritance! If you have a form or control that will constantly be using the same styles and you want to set that as your base, just create your own user controls that inherit from a form/control. By default all of your forms will inherit from "Form". Instead of inheriting from the default form, create a new user control that inherits from Form, and then have that as your base class.

CustomForm : Form // Your custom form.

Form1 : CustomForm // Inherit from it.

...the same works for components. If you want a button to have the same styles across the board, create a user control and have it inherit from the button control -- then use the custom control.

Whenever you want to make a change to your base styles, or any settings, simply change your custom controls settings -- your new forms/controls will automatically be updated!

Do the same thing. Don't pass it by ref. UserControl is a reference object already, so there's no need to pass it into your method using the ref keyword.

You may also want to consider a recursive method that will find all the UserControls on the form and pass it into your method.

How about a base class which provides such settings?

Two answers:

1. You don't need ref, controls are objects are reference types. Just drop it.
2. Create a Base UserControl and derive your controls form that base. You can still do that, just edit the class definitions of the controls. For new controls you can follow the Wizard.

A tip: setup the styling in the baseControl. Then make sure the derived controls don't override, the best way to do that is scanning the *.Designer.cs files and remove all settings that you know should come from the base.