Visual Basic 2005 with .NET 3.0 Programmer's Reference

Visual Basic .NET provides a huge number of graphical classes. This chapter provides an overview of these classes. It also focuses on the most important graphics class: Graphics. The Graphics class provides methods that let you draw and fill rectangles, ellipses, polygons, curves, lines, and other shapes. Pen and Brush objects determine the appearance of lines (solid, dashed, dotted) and filled areas (solid colors, hatched, filled with a color gradient). Other Graphics properties and methods let you determine the types of anti-aliasing used when drawing different kinds of objects, and how drawings are transformed.

Chapter 21 describes the next two most important graphics classes: Brush and Pen. It also explains the GraphicsPath object that you can use to draw and fill paths consisting of lines, shapes, curves, and text.