Order of controls in a form's Control property in C#

Question

I am having a peculiar problem with the order in which FlowLayoutPanels are added in to the form\'s controls property. This is what I tried,

I added

Answer 1

Is it really a problem?

As long as the UI operates correctly (in terms of tab order, for example), I'd recommend that you don't make any assumptions about the order in which they're enumerated.

EDIT: Thanks for explaining your requirement in more detail. I think I'd still recommend against using the order that they're stored in the Controls collection. It's always best to consider these implementation details to be 'opaque'. You have a tag associated with each control, so you can use this to identify the correct control. In order to speed up the processing, you could build a 7-element array that references the controls by ordinal:

FlowLayoutPanel[] panels = new FlowLayoutPanel[7];

foreach(FlowLayoutPanel panel in this.Controls)
{
    panels[(int)panel.Tag] = panel;
}

// Now, you can reference the panels directly by subscript:

panels[2].BackColor = Color.Aquamarine;

Though I'd put some type-checking in to make this code a bit more robust!