The .NET 2.0 upgrade included many minor improvements that are easily overlooked. One such improvement is Padding, a handy structure in the System.Windows.Forms namespace that you may find useful for representing offsets, margins or padding in the user interface.
Changing a font style is a bit easier than changing its size, as there is a Font constructor that accepts a font and style as arguments. For example, to bold a label’s font:
An inspection of the Font class will reveal that every public property is read-only. This means to change a font’s size, you need to create a new Font object with all the same properties of your current font but with the new size. Here is a handy method to do just that:
There is a very handy .NET class called ControlPaint in the System.Windows.Forms namespace that enables you to draw your own controls and control elements using the standard Windows style and theme. Buried in this rich class are four methods that enable you to lighten and darken colors:
It’s hard to believe the comprehensive .NET framework would omit such obvious functions as GetPixel and SetPixel from its Drawing library. Fortunately, we can access the GDI functions using Interop, as shown below. Notice the conversion required between the COLORREF integer used by the GDI methods and the Color structure used by our static .NET methods.
If you use images in a .NET application, chances are you will find it more convenient to embed those images as resources in your project, rather than leaving them as separate files and trying to locate and load the images from disk when the application runs.
