Book 56

This Wrox Blox is a value-packed resource to help experienced .NET developers learn the new .NET release. It is excerpted from the Wrox books: Professional C# 4 and .NET 4, Professional ASP.NET 4, and WPF Programmer’s Reference by Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Rod Stephens, and includes more than 100 print book pages drawn from these three key titles. It is an excellent resource to help .NET developers get up to speed fast on .NET 4, C# 4.0, ASP.NET 4, and WPF, providing all the information needed to program with the important new features, including: C# Dynamic Types and Parallel Tasks; ASP.NET Ajax, Chart Controls, MVC, and Object Caching; and key WPF principles as developers move from WinForms to WPF. In addition, it provides examples built with the native Visual Studio 2010 tools that developers are comfortable with.

Book 103

C# Graphics Programming

by Rod Stephens

Published 26 February 2008

This Wrox Blox teaches you how to add graphics to C# 2008 applications, explaining fundamental graphics techniques such as: drawing shapes with different colors and line styles; filling areas with colors, gradients, and patterns; drawing text that is properly aligned, sized, and clipped exactly where you want it; manipulating images and saving results in bitmap, JPEG, and other types of files. Also covered are instructions for how to greatly increase your graphics capabilities using transformations. Transformations allow you to move, stretch, or rotate graphics. They also let you work in coordinate systems that make sense for your application. You will also learn how to use all of these techniques in printouts. The author describes the sequence of events that produce a printout and shows how to generate and preview printouts.

The final sections describe two powerful new graphic tools that were introduced with .NET Framework 3.0: WPF graphics and FlowDocuments. WPF applications can use XAML graphic commands to declaratively draw and fill the same kinds of shapes that a program can draw by using graphics objects.

Finally, a discussion on the FlowDocument object shows you how to define items that should be flowed across multiple pages as space permits. This lets you display text, graphics, controls, and other items that automatically flow across page breaks. FlowDocument viewers make displaying these documents easy for you, and simplifies the user's reading of the documents.

This Wrox Blox also contains 35 example programs written in C# 2008, although most of the code works in previous versions of C# as well. The most notable exceptions are WPF graphics and FlowDocuments, both of which require WPF provided in .NET Framework 3.0 and later.