Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Chapter 4. Drawing Basics

As handy as forms are, especially when laden with controls, sometimes the built-in controls^[1] aren't sufficient to render the state of your application. In that case, you need to draw the state yourself. The drawing may be to the screen, to a file, or to a printer, but wherever you're drawing to, you'll be dealing with the same primitives—colors, brushes, pens, and fonts—and the same kinds of things to draw: shapes, images, and strings. This chapter starts by examining the basics of drawing to the screen and the basic building blocks of drawing.

^[1] The standard controls that come with WinForms are listed in Appendix D: Standard WinForms Components and Controls.

Note that all the drawing techniques discussed in this ...