.NET Windows® Forms Custom Controls

The ControlPaint Class

Although not part of GDI+, the ControlPaint class offers several methods for drawing standard UI elements. In fact, the IconButton developed in the preceding two chapters used the ControlPaint class to draw the button itself. It is interesting to note that although this class exists, the base class library does not use it. The standard Button class, found in the System.Windows.Forms namespace, implements its own drawing logic. The class itself is worth mentioning because it does provide a mechanism for drawing standard controls such as buttons, check boxes, and even focus rectangles. Also because IL (Intermediate Language) is fairly readable, loading up System.Windows.Forms.dll into ILDASM.exe and peeking into the ControlPaint ...