Advanced Shape Control

• Download source & demo project  - 168 Kb

Introduction

For some reason microsoft decided that we don't need the shape control that comes with Visual Studio 6.0, and removed it from VS.NET and left us to buy a third party control or develop one by our own.

Well, with the extensive namespaces that dot net supports for GDI+ and Windows Controls, it's easy to develop and extend the old shape control. The main purpose of this control is, its a lightweight control and  improves the user interface very much by grouping controls with out using a Group box or other controls.

This article is also a good resource for GDI+, and propertygrid control. I am developing this control as a Windows Extended controls library, to which i will be adding more controls in future. So, any suggetions for custom controls are welcome.

This article assumes that you have good understanding of GDI+, PropertyGrid and Windows Controls.

Refer to my other article on propertygrid Using PropertyGrid

NameSpaces Used 

System.ComponentModel
System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization
System.Text
System.Drawing
System.Drawing.Drawing2D
System.Globalization
System.Reflection
System.Windows.Forms

Topics Covered 

• GDI +
• Windows Controls
• PropertyGrid

Description

The attached project has a demo showing how to use the control. Well, using the control is fairly simple yet very extensive. It supports 4 shapes with Solid colors, Gradiant fill, Textures, Hatch fills, shadows, 3D Borders,text and 3D border styles. Using these combinations you can create a variety of effects. The main purpose of this control is to improve the visual appearance of the forms, so use of 1 or 2 instances will be enough to achive the result.

Properties 

Properties are divided into sub categories as 

Borderproperties

TextProperties

HatchProperties

GradiantProperties     

ShadowProperties

Each of these properties can be expanded from propertygrid and customized based on the requirement also these properties can be turned on or off by a Drawxxxx property.   

ToDo Features

• Implement support for other shapes
• Implement a C# version
• Implement 3D Borders for all shapes

Notes

• Please post any remarks,bugs to this article's thread
• Suggestions are welcome for windows controls as part of my Windows Extended Controls Library