Question

I’m using Visual C#.NET, and am making an app that uses winforms. I essentially need to open multiple files as strings, and manipulate the data in various places without saving the information back to the file. How do I go about storing this data so that I may use it in various parts of my code?

Answer 1

Why open them “as strings”? Strings in .NET are immutable, so it could get expensive if you are making lots of changes. The normal approach would be to parse / deserialize the data out into an object model, and pass that object model into your forms – i.e.

MyModel model = MyModel.Load(path);
MyForm form = new MyForm();
form.Model = model;

or similar. Then your form can access properties of the model:

captionTextBox.Text = model.Title; // etc

or use data-binding if you really want:

captionTextBox.DataBindings.Add("Text", model, "Title");

(which will enable 1-way or 2-way binding, depending on whether your model also provides change-notifications)