Passing Information Between Winforms the Sneaky Way

There are many ways to pass data between form in .NET. This article, Passing Data Between Forms, at the Code Project is an excellent one that shows 4 ways to do it. My favorite way to do it is with delegates and events.

However, very often you simply need a quick and dirty solution where you open up a quick data entry form and get the data back. Using delegates and events is overkill.

Well, I needed to do it yet once again for some software for Super Simple, and while looking at some past code of mine, I thought, “Wow! Man, that’s sneaky!” So, here I’ll explain a quick and dirty little way to get some fast data with minimal coding and almost zero effort.

The basic method is to:

  1. Open a new form
  2. The user enters the data and closes the form
  3. In the OnClosing event, save the data to Properties.Settings.Default.SomeVariable
  4. In the main form, get the data back from the settings

So, in code, that looks like this:

In Form1 (the main form):

Form2 form2 = new Form2();
form2.ShowDialog();
string myVariable = Settings.Default.SomeVariable;

In Form2 (the data entry form):

private void btnOk_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Properties.Settings.Default.SomeVariable = txtSomeVariable.Text.Trim();
    this.Close();
}

Quick, easy and just a little bit sneaky~!

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