Hour 10. Drawing and Printing

C# provides an amazingly powerful array of drawing capabilities. However, this power comes at the price of a steep learning curve. Drawing isn't intuitive; you can't sit down for a few minutes with the online Help text and start drawing graphics. After you learn the basic principles involved, however, you'll find that drawing isn't that complicated. In this hour, you'll learn the basic skills for drawing shapes and text to a form or other graphical surface. You'll learn about pens, colors, and brushes. In addition, you'll learn how to persist graphics on a form—and even how to create bitmaps that exist solely in memory.

The highlights of this hour include the following:

• Understanding the Graphics object

• Working with pens

• Using system colors

• Working with rectangles

• Drawing shapes

• Drawing text

• Persisting graphics on a form