Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Paths

In addition to using the basic shapes, you can compose and draw shapes together using a path. A path, modeled via the GraphicsPath class, is very much like a Graphics object, in that it's a logical container of zero or more shapes (called figures or subpaths). The difference (in addition to the fact that a Graphics object is backed by a surface such as a screen or a printer) is that the figures can be started and ended arbitrarily. This means that you can compose one or more complicated figures from a set of basic shapes. You collect figures into a path so that you can frame or fill them as a unit using a single brush or pen, which is applied when the path is drawn. For example, Figure 4.19 shows a rounded rectangle (a shape that the Graphics ...