Question

Is it okay to place "view = new Person" within the button event handler? If I don’t, and I place it within the Form1 constructor, only my last value gets added. Is that the proper way if I want to declare a new instance and then add it to my Arraylist?

    private ArrayList store;

    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        store = new ArrayList();
    }

    private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    { }

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        //Is it okay to declare a new instance of the Person class 
        // with each button push?            
        Person view = new Person();
        view.firstname = txtFirstName.Text;
        view.lastname = txtLastName.Text;
        store.Add(view);
        txtFirstName.Clear();
        txtLastName.Clear();   
    }

    private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        foreach (Person display in store)
        {
            MessageBox.Show(display.ToString());
        }
    }

Answer 1

Is it okay to place “view = new Person” within the button event handler?

Yes. If your goal is to make a new person each time you click the button, this is appropriate to do.

On a side note: You should consider using List<Person> instead of ArrayList. This is the newer, type-safe list class (as of .NET 2.0), and far nicer to use.