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 of some kind. By contrast, the drawing library provided in the .NET Framework makes it relatively easy to create your own images when you need them. Indeed, it provides the ability to do almost anything you can imagine in the way of 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 just a sampling of what you can do with the .NET drawing libraries and a little bit of custom code.