Programatically setting control properties vs. using designer

Question

Often, when I'm looking for information of how to set certain properties of controls (I'm using Visual Studio primarily, but this question does apply to any IDE), the examples I find normally involve programatically setting said properties.

Here's an example, using the DataGridView.DefaultCellStyle property on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datagridview.defaultcellstyle(v=vs.110).aspx

So my question is: is it better for a programmer to modify these properties by code, or is it better to use the IDE itself to change them via the properties pane? I realize that doing it the latter way will result in auto-generated code anyway, but it will be "somewhere else" in relation to the main bulk of user-generated code.

Answer 1

It depends on your requirements. If the app you are developing is planned to be dynamic, then it is a good idea to do it the way it is described in the reference you provided. For example, you may create a class containing the method which will set the basic settings of the gridview, so on every page you may just call this method and pass to it the gridview as a parameter instead of repeating setting the grid properties on every page.