Question

I am having a go at creating some custom controls based on specific configurations that I use.

My first one, is simply to create a standard exit button. However, it’s not working how I think. Essentially, I want the default text to be “Exit Application”, when it is added to the form. Unfortunately, the two ways that I have thought of, dont actually show that, instead it shows the name of the button class, i.e. “CustomExitButton1”. This is the two ways I have tried:

public class StandardExitButton : Button
{

    public StandardExitButton()
    {
        this.ControlAdded += new ControlEventHandler(StandardExitButton_ControlAdded);
    }

    void StandardExitButton_ControlAdded(object sender, ControlEventArgs e)
    {
        Text = "Exit Application";
    }
}

And:

public class StandardExitButton : Button
{

    public StandardExitButton()
    {
        this.Text = "Exit Application";
    }


}

Answer 1

I’ve done this with a bunch of buttons, such as Add, Edit, Delete, Cancel, Ok, Exit, etc… In addition to keeping all my buttons, labels, textboxes, etc with my own standard font sizes, colors, etc … For the text, on each subclassed button, I did something like …

[ReadOnly(true)]
public override string Text
{ get { return "&Exit Application"; } }

Never have to worry about a “setter” since the button’s text should never change in the designer or derived…

EDIT — more complete sample…

public class MyButton : Button
{
    [ReadOnly(true)]
    public sealed override Font Font
    { get { return new Font("Arial", 9F, FontStyle.Italic, GraphicsUnit.Point); } }

    [ReadOnly(true)]
    public sealed override Color ForeColor
    { get { return Color.Blue; } }

    public GDITButton()
    { }
}


public class MyExitButton : MyButton
{
    [ReadOnly(true)]
    public override string Text
    { get { return "Exit"; } }

    public MyExitButton()
    {}
}

public class MyAddButton : MyButton
{
    [ReadOnly(true)]
    public override string Text
    { get { return "Add"; } }

    public MyAddButton()
    {}
}

Then, when you put an instance of the MyExitButton or MyAddButton on the form, it will FORCE the caption for you and also prevent you from changing it as it is a read-only property of the respective class.