Summary

Visual Basic .NET provides a huge variety of objects for drawing graphics. The three most important drawing classes are Graphics, Pen, and Brush.

The Graphics object represents the canvas on which you will draw. It provides methods that let you draw and fill all sorts of shapes including lines, rectangles, ellipses, polygons, text, and curves. It also provides methods for transforming those commands to translate, scale, and rotate the results.

The Pen object determines the appearance of lines. It sets the lines’ color, thickness, dash style, fill pattern, and caps.

Various kinds of brush objects determine the appearance of filled areas. They can fill areas with solid colors, tiled images, hatch patterns, linear color gradients, and color gradients that follow a path.

These classes and the others described in this chapter give you powerful tools for drawing graphics of practically unlimited complexity and sophistication.

This chapter discusses the brushes, pens, and paths that you use to draw lines, curves, and other shapes. Chapter 22 explains how to draw text. Although you can display simple text in a Label, TextBox, or other control, when you draw text using GDI+ routines you have greater control over exactly how the text is drawn.