Gdi+ Programming: Creating Custom Controls Using C#

GREAT BOOK! The book was by far the easiest to follow book for GDI+ and Custom Controls using C#. I am very pleased and highly recommend this to all who wish to learn GDI+.If you are moving up from GDI, you will find that GDI+ is about 50 times slower, but 50 times easier to program.

One of my first .NET ah-hah experiences back in 2001 was creating an .aspx file that I could reference as a graphic (!). The .aspx file received two query parameters which informed it of the file name of the jpg and the width that the returned image was supposed to be. So then in an IMG tag, I would simply put src="ShowPicture.aspx?file=product1343.jpg & width=100" and it would display a thumbnail of that picture 100 pixels wide and proportionally high. This is an excellent way to produce dynamic pictures as well as protect your online photographs (show thumbnails to visitors, full sized pictures to members), and the .NET GDI+ classes are straight-forward and easy to use. Ever since then I have been looking for a book which goes into deeper detail of creating graphics in .NET with the GDI+ classes. Wrox has finally produced this book! In chapters 1 through 10 you get the basics: pens, brushes, texts, fonts, image manipulation, paths, regions and printing. Then in the rest of the book you learn how to make custom controls which create custom graphics (I love books that teach two things at a time -- great for developers who do four things at a time). If you read this book, you will think about graphics differently, namely, as dynamic objects which your application, the user and the environment can manipulate at run time. Very exciting.

This is the kind of book you want to read when you want to get started with GDI+ development, and custom controls in particular. Yes, there are a lot of things that are not explained, but they, GDI+ and custom control development is a huge topic and couldn't possibly be covered in one book! The information provided in this book is excellent. It covers the basics of GDI+, custom control development, printing, and even web related stuff you may not think of at first. What's missing is how to build input-oriented controls, such as as fancy grids or spreadsheets and other advanced topics. But then again, I wouldn't expect a book like this to cover these topics.

This book is an excellent introduction to GDI+. The examples are to the point and practial. Reading this book will give you the masterly of the most visual aspects of .net. Unlike most of recent Wrox book, there seems to be great planning and coordination and continuity between the chapters. The style of writing is fluid and easy to understand. This is one of the top 3 .net books out there.

This book is a great read for anyone who needs a practical guide to working with the GDI+ support baked into the .NET Framework. As a developer that reviewed the manuscript before it went to print I was impressed by how easily the author(s) expressed key concepts and followed through with concrete examples. Buy this book if you need to expand on the graphical capabilities provided out of the box or need to get to work on some custom controls.