15.0 Introduction

The ability to draw or retrieve and display graphic images on your web pages on the fly can add powerful functionality to an application. This is a nearly impossible task in classic ASP unless you use a third-party component. By contrast, the drawing library provided in the .NET Framework simplifies creating your own images when you need them. Indeed, it provides the ability to do almost anything you can imagine for image generation. The examples shown in this chapter show you how to:

• Draw button images on the fly using text generated during the running of your application

• Create bar charts on the fly

• Display images stored in a database

• Display thumbnails from full-sized images stored in a database

These represent a sampling of what you can do with the .NET drawing libraries and a little bit of custom code.