Visual Basic 2010 Lesson 22 – The DrawRectangle Method

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22.1 Creating a Rectangle with DrawRectangle Method

There are two methods to draw a rectangle on the screen in VB2010:

Method 1

Use the DrawRectangle method by specifying its upper-left corner’s coordinate and it width and height. You also need to create a Graphics and a Pen object to handle the actual drawing. The syntax is:

myGrapphics.DrawRectangle(myPen, X, Y, width, height)

*myGraphics is the variable name of the Graphics object and myPen is the variable name of the Pen object created by you. X, Y is the coordinate of the upper left corner of the rectangle.

The code

Dim myPen As Pen
 myPen = New Pen(Drawing.Color.Blue, 5)
Dim myGraphics As Graphics = Me.CreateGraphics
 myGraphics.DrawRectangle(myPen, 0, 0, 100, 50)

Method 2

Create a rectangle object first and then draw this rectangle using the DrawRectangle method. The syntax is as shown below:

myGraphics.DrawRectangle(myPen,myRectangle)

where myRectangle is the rectangle object created by you, the user.

The code is:

Dim myRectangle As New Rectangle
 myRect.X = 10
 myRect.Y = 10
 myRect.Width = 100
 myRect.Height = 50

You can also create a rectangle object using a one-line code as follows:

Dim myRectangle As New Rectangle(X,Y,width, height)

and the code to draw the above rectangle is

myGraphics.DrawRectangle(myPen, myRectangle)

22.2 Customizing Line Style of the Pen Object

The shape we draw so far are drawn with a solid line, we can actually customize the line style of the Pen object so that we have dotted line, a line consisting of dashes and more. For example, the syntax to draw a dotted line is shown below:

myPen.DashStyle=Drawing.Drawing2D.DashStyle.Dot

Where the last argument Dot specifies a particular line DashStyle value, a line that makes up of dots here. The following code draws a rectangle with the red dotted line.

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim myPen As Pen
 myPen = New Pen(Drawing.Color.Red, 5)
Dim myGraphics As Graphics = Me.CreateGraphics
 myPen.DashStyle = Drawing.Drawing2D.DashStyle.Dot
 myGraphics.DrawRectangle(myPen, 10, 10, 100, 50)
End Sub

The output image is shown below:

Figure 22.1

If you change the DashStyle value to DashDotDot, you can draw rectangles with different border, as shown in Figure 22.2.

The possible values of the line DashStyle of the Pen are listed in the table below:

Figure 22.2

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