Best way to save the state of controls of Winform forms?

Question

If your app has 1 form, that has n group boxes each of which contain any number of controls. How would you save the settings of all these controls?

A few things I am concerned are:

1. I don't need properties like BackColor to be saved, because they aren't changed by the user.

2. I need a way so that when I add new properties or remove some properties from these custom controls, they don't have problem loading the settings back.

How to best do this?

I was thinking of using serialization? If that would be better, which serialization is recommended? Binary/Xml/? Examples are welcome.

Answer 1

I would say if you are storing a model that the properties could change, you could take a look at Custom Serialization. It talks at the end of the article about storing versioning information for changes in the model to help with deserialization.

Answer 2

I would use data binding to bind the content of all relevant controls to a custom (non-ui) class, then I would just serialize (XML or binary) that class. I would choose XML serialization at least while you are developing, since it will help you when debugging (you can take a look at the serialized files at any time).