Question

I have a form MainForm which is a Windows Forms form that contains many child controls. I want to call one function on MainForm that notifies all of its children. Does the Windows Forms form provide a means to do this? I played with update, refresh and invalidate with no success.

Answer 1

foreach (Control ctrl in this.Controls)
{
    // call whatever you want on ctrl
}

If you want access to all controls on the form, and also all the controls on each control on the form (and so on, recursively), use a function like this:

public void DoSomething(Control.ControlCollection controls)
{
    foreach (Control ctrl in controls)
    {
        // do something to ctrl
        MessageBox.Show(ctrl.Name);
        // recurse through all child controls
        DoSomething(ctrl.Controls);
    }
}

… which you call by initially passing in the form’s Controls collection, like this:

DoSomething(this.Controls);