How to set the DefaultValue for the Font property

Introduction

This article tells you about solving a very common problem in Visual Studio .NET 2003! You know that we could set the default value for some properties with the DefaultValue attribute, such as in the below command:

[System.ComponentModel.DefaultValue(...)]

But if you want to set the default value for the Font property in this manner, you will see a very abnormal behavior and it doesn't work! Because, the Font property is not a simple property. I spent some time to solve this problem, and at last, I got the solution...

Scenario: Suppose that you want to create a button that is inherited from Microsoft Button, and you want to set the default value of the Font property to Tahoma with an 8 point size.

Solution: The below example will tell you how to do that:

public class Button : System.Windows.Forms.Button
{
    private static System.Drawing.Font _defaultFont =
        new System.Drawing.Font("Tahoma",
        8.25f, System.Drawing.FontStyle.Regular,
        System.Drawing.GraphicsUnit.Point,
        178,
        false);

        public override System.Drawing.Font Font
        {
            get
            {
                return(base.Font);
            }
            set
            {
                if(value == null)
                    base.Font = _defaultFont;
                else
                {
                    if(value == System.Windows.Forms.Control.DefaultFont)
                        base.Font = _defaultFont;
                    else
                        base.Font = value;
                }
            }
        }

        public override void ResetFont()
        {
            Font = null;
        }

        private bool ShouldSerializeFont()
        {
            return(!Font.Equals(_defaultFont));
        }

        public Button()
        {
            Font = _defaultFont;
        }
    }

As you see in the above code, I did not write any attributes for the Font property, and instead, I used two methods with the names of ResetFont() and ShouldSerializeFont(). You should know that for each property in .NET, we have these two methods:

• ResetSomeProperty()
• ShouldSerializeSomeProperty()