Chapter 7. Redrawing and GDI+

Windows Forms applications are nothing if not visual—the display of information is central to most programs with a user interface. And although the framework ships with a useful range of built-in controls, some applications have presentation requirements that cannot be met by the standard controls or even by third-party components. Fortunately, controls can customize their appearance using GDI+, .NET's powerful and feature-rich drawing library.

All custom controls must manage their own appearance, because the Control class does no drawing at all. So we will start off by looking at the model Windows Forms uses for letting controls draw themselves. Then we will look at the GDI+ library itself, examining the classes it defines and the drawing facilities it supplies.