Question

I’m working on cleaning up an app I’m almost finished with and I noticed something that made me curious as to why it’s being done that way. While you can edit the .Designer.cs in your project for a form, there is a lot of autogenerated stuff in there, such as the creation of variables and controls. They have the Windows Form Designer generated code which hardly ever gets touched by me. But as I was making variables in the format I like them:

string strValue1,
       strValue2;

As compared to:

string strValue1;
string strValue2;

I noticed that Windows declares the controls on the bottom of the file then creates/instantiates them in the InitializeComponent() function. Now, I knowI could take the “new” instances and put them where the declarations are and it seems to run fine. My question is what’s the benefit of one over the other? Or is this the way it is so Windows can autogenerate them for us? If there’s a possibility of better performance for doing it one way over another, I’d like to know. Thanks guys for the help.

Example 1:

private void InitializeComponent()
{
  ...
  this.control1 = new System.Windows.Forms.Control();
  ...
}

...

System.Windows.Forms.Control control1;

Example 2:

private void InitializeComponent()
{
  ...
}

...

System.Windows.Forms.Control control1 = new System.Windows.Forms.Control();

Answer 1

Do not edit that code. It is auto-generated and the designer actually reads the code back to recreate the form in the designer. When you make changes like this, it is very likely you’ll bomb the designer and your form becomes un-designable. Even if you do manage to avoid crashing it, your changes will simply disappear when you alter the form in the designer.

Anything in the region that’s marked “Windows Forms Designer generated code” is hands-off.

There is no benefit whatsoever to changes like these. It generates the exact same code.