Why is System.Drawing.Color not an enum

Question

Why is System.Drawing.Color a struct and System.ConsoleColor an enum ?

Answer 1

Because the console only supports a small set of colours, whereas System.Drawing models all possible 24-bit colours (32-bit with alpha). That's over 4 billion possible colours, which would be a big enum!

Here are the console colours:

There are 16 foreground, plus 16 background colours.

Note that in System.Drawing some colours are given names, but they're not an enum -- they're static fields, such as Color.Red and Color.Aquamarine.

The same is true of System.Windows.Media.Color (as used in WPF).

Answer 2

Because there are 16 well known colors for console, but 16777216 colors (plus 256 alpha levels for each) that can be used in general. Would you like to name all 4 billion of them and write code that then converts these enums back into actual RGBA values?