Now I understand what you are trying to do. This is referred to as Binding. Unfortunately WinForms lacks a graceful way to bind properties between 2 object without writing code(WPF does this nicely). There are a couple ways to go about this. One would be to use an Application Setting to hold the Count value. After you add an object to the form, in the Properties Window at the top is a section named "(Application Settings)". You can drill into this to create a new application setting and link it to the property of choice. So let's say you create a setting named AlarmCount. In your code, you would manipulate the value as such:
My.Settings.AlarmCount = 0
If you binded this to a property, when the value changes it will automatically push the new value into the property also. This is a similar technique where I demonstrated how to mimic tags as done in other HMI software.
Another method for binding that is a bit more complicated is to add properties to your object to specify the control to bind to and the property. Attached is a modified version of your project showing this technique. In design view, if you select the NavActiveAlarm and look at the Properties, you will see where I added DataBindingSource and DataBindingProperty. In the example, I set those to TextBox1 and Text. I also added ImageNoAlarm and ImageAlarm properties. These added properties create a re-usable control in which different instances can be bound to different values.
