So I created a lot of buttons (a-z). Unfortunately, when I reopened the document later, they're all blacked out and I'm having to go through and individually change the buttons appearance one at a time.
Is there a 'format painter' of some kind in visual studio express so that I can just change one's appearance, then copy that over to each next button?
The Windows Forms, WPF and other UI designers in Visual Studio allow you to select multiple controls at once, by Ctrl+Click, Shift+Click or by dragging a selection ("rubber band") rectangle around the relevant controls.
Once you've done that, the properties editor displays those properties that the controls have in common. Changing a property changes it for all of the selected controls.