Saving & Loading a Form's state (.NET C#)

Saving and loading the state of a window is a very much appreciated (and often overlooked) feature of an application. There is a slight trick to it though. It is not apparent unless you dig a bit. Based on the state of the Form the Location and Size are not what you expect. If a window is anything but FormWindowState.Normal the Size and Location are not the values you want to save. Instead you need to store the RestoreBounds values of those fields. I have an example implementation below for storing the state of a Form to a string followed by the code to restore it.

   1:  public static string GetFormSettings(Form zForm)

   2:  {

   3:      if (FormWindowState.Normal == zForm.WindowState)

   4:      {

   5:          return zForm.Location.X + ";" + zForm.Location.Y + ";" +

   6:              zForm.Size.Width + ";" + zForm.Size.Height + ";" +

   7:              (int)zForm.WindowState;

   8:      }

   9:      else

  10:      {

  11:          return zForm.RestoreBounds.Location.X + ";" + zForm.RestoreBounds.Location.Y + ";" +

  12:              zForm.RestoreBounds.Size.Width + ";" + zForm.RestoreBounds.Size.Height + ";" +

  13:              (int)zForm.WindowState;

  14:      }

  15:  }

  16:   

  17:  public static void RestoreState(Form zForm, string sInput)

  18:  {

  19:      string[] arraySplit = sInput.Split(new char[] { ';' });

  20:      int[] nValues = new int[5];

  21:      if (5 == arraySplit.Length)

  22:      {

  23:          for (int nIdx = 0; nIdx < arraySplit.Length; nIdx++)

  24:          {

  25:              nValues[nIdx] = int.Parse(arraySplit[nIdx]);

  26:          }

  27:          zForm.Location = new Point(nValues[0], nValues[1]);

  28:          zForm.Size = new Size(nValues[2], nValues[3]);

  29:          zForm.WindowState = (FormWindowState)nValues[4];

  30:      }

  31:  }

MSDN Forms.RestoreBounds