From Dan Mabbutt,
Your Guide to Visual Basic.
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Mar 4 2007

GDI+ is the way to draw shapes, fonts, images or generally anything graphic in Visual Basic .NET. You can get the most from this tutorial by starting with Part 1 where the fundamentals of GDI+ are explained.

Previous Lesson Links

• Part 1 - Introduction to GDI+ and the Graphics object
• Part 2 - Drawing a curve with a series of connected points
• Part 3 - Advanced vector graphics with an intro to bitmapped graphics
• Part 4 - Blending and merging colors and shapes in the same graphic
• Part 5 - Coordinate Spaces and Matrix Transformations

Most of what you can do with GDI+ vector graphics - drawing and moving shapes directly with methods - has been explained, but it's been a rushed trip to cover the major points. There are a lot of details that haven't been covered because they're not part of the main thrust of GDI+. They are part of what makes GDI+ so useful, however.

Here are some of the things that we're going to go over in this segment of the tutorial:

• GraphicsPath - So far, the tutorial has focused on rectangle and elipse shapes. Use the GraphicsPath object to draw any kind of shape - or a whole collection of shapes.
• Clipping Regions - Another way to control where your images are drawn including a discussion of how to combine clipping regions with boolean operations.

On the next page, we start coding with GraphicsPath.