Professional C# 4 and .NET 4

Chapter 48. Graphics with GDI+

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Principles of drawing

• Colors and the safety palette

• Pens and brushes

• Lines and simple shapes

• BMP images and other image files

• Drawing Text

• Fonts and font families

• Dealing with printing

You will notice that quite a number of chapters in this book deal with user interaction and the .NET Framework. Chapter 39, "Windows Forms," focused on how to display either a dialog box or a Single Document Interface (SDI) or Multiple Document Interface (MDI) window, and how to place various controls such as buttons, text boxes, and list boxes. It also looked at how to work with data in Windows Forms using a number of the Windows Forms controls that work with the disparate data sources that you might encounter.

Although these standard controls are powerful and, by themselves, quite adequate for the complete user interface for many applications, some situations require more flexibility. For example, you might want to draw text in a given font in a precise position in a window, or display images without using a picture box control, or draw simple shapes or other graphics. None of this can be done with the controls discussed in Chapter 39. To display that kind of output, the application must instruct the operating system what to display and where in the window to display it.

In the process, you need to use a variety of helper objects, including pens (to define the characteristics of lines), brushes (to define how areas are filled in), and fonts (to define ...