I think it will be very easy if you set the rowcount and columncount in
the app.cofig(also a xml file).
eg: the code snippet in the app.config
<appSettings>
   <!--TableLayoutPanel.ColumnCount-->
   <add key="ColumnCount" value="4"/>
   <!--TableLayoutPanel.RowCount-->
   <add key="RowCount" value="3"/>
 </appSettings>
Then you can read them out using the code like this:
String
rowCount=System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["RowCount"];
int rowCountValue=int.Parse(rowCount);