Passing a Variable between forms (colour values)

Question

I'm still new to c# and been playing around a bit, for my project I have these two forms, on form 1 I have these variables

 Color ColCurrentPrimary = Color.FromArgb(35, 39, 42);
 Color ColCurrentSecondary = Color.FromArgb(44, 47, 51);

On form 2

I have a window dialog, and this should keep the same theme

eg:

this.BackColor = ColCurrentPrimary;
this.ForeColor = ColCurrentSecondary;

However, ColCurrent Primary and secondary don't exist on Form 2, how would I go about passing them? or is there a "Global" that can be accessed from both forms?

any advice would be much appreciated,

thank you for reading,

Samuel

Answer 1

A solution that would work very well for you would be a Singleton . Read through that page - it will tell you everything you need to know about creating one. Once you have it, you can initialize it's properties from either a config file or just set them in code - then the class can be used globally to configure any new forms.

This is what I usually use:

public sealed class Singleton
{
    private static Singleton instance = null;
    private static readonly object padlock = new object();

    //add public properties here to use for your config!
    public Color ColCurrentPrimary { get; set; }

    Singleton()
    {
    }

    public static Singleton Instance
    {
        get
        {
            lock (padlock)
            {
                if (instance == null)
                {
                    instance = new Singleton();
                }
                return instance;
            }
        }
    }
}

Then you can use it like this:

Singleton.Instance.ColCurrentPrimary 

As Steve has mentioned, you could use a static class also. That may be simpler for your case. Singletons are great for multi threaded applications but may be a little overkill for this. Here is an example of a static class:

static class Config
{
    public static Color ColCurrentPrimary { get; set; }
}

Then you can use it like this:

Config.ColCurrentPrimary

You just have to make sure that you define the class in a namespace that you will have access to where you need to access it, or add a using statement to make it accessible.