Sams Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours

By James Foxall and Wendy Haro-Chun

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Authors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • Audience and Organization
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Onward and Upward!
  • Part I. The Visual Studio Environment
  • Hour 1. A C# Programming Tour
  • Hour 2. Navigating C#
  • Hour 3. Understanding Objects and Collections
  • Hour 4. Understanding Events
  • Part II. Building a User Interface
  • Hour 5. Building FormsPart I
  • Hour 6. Building FormsPart II
  • Hour 7. Working with the Traditional Controls
  • Hour 8. Advanced Controls
  • Hour 9. Adding Menus and Toolbars to Forms
  • Hour 10. Drawing and Printing
    • Understanding the Graphics Object
    • Working with Pens
    • Using System Colors
    • Working with Rectangles
    • Drawing Shapes
    • Drawing Text
    • Persisting Graphics on a Form
    • Build a Graphics Project Example
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Part III. Making Things HappenProgramming!
  • Hour 11. Creating and Calling Methods
  • Hour 12. Using Constants, Data Types, Variables, and Arrays
  • Hour 13. Performing Arithmetic, String Manipulation, and Date/Time Adjustments
  • Hour 14. Making Decisions in C# Code
  • Hour 15. Looping for Efficiency
  • Hour 16. Debugging Your Code
  • Hour 17. Designing Objects Using Classes
  • Hour 18. Interacting with Users
  • Part IV. Working with Data
  • Hour 19. Performing File Operations
  • Hour 20. Controlling Other Applications Using Automation
  • Hour 21. Working with a Database
  • Part V. Deploying Solutions and Beyond
  • Hour 22. Deploying a Solution
  • Hour 23. Introduction to Web Development
  • Hour 24. The 10,000-Foot View
  • Appendix A. Answers to Quizzes/Exercises

Drawing Text

Printing text on a Graphics object is very similar to drawing a shape, and the method name even contains the word Draw, in contrast to Print. To draw text on a Graphics object, call the DrawString() method. The basic format for DrawString() looks like this:

   object.DrawString(stringoftext, 
   font, 
   brush, 
   topX, 
   leftY);

A few of these items are probably new to you. The argument stringoftext is fairly self-explanatory; it's the string you want to draw on the Graphics object. The topX and leftY arguments represent the coordinate at which drawing will take place; they represent the upper-left corner of the string, as illustrated in Figure 10.4.

Figure 10.4 The coordinate specified in DrawString() represents the upper-left corner of the printed text.

The arguments brush and font aren't so obvious. Both arguments accept objects. A brush is similar to a pen. However, whereas a pen describes the characteristics of a line, a brush describes the characteristics of a fill. For example, both pens and brushes have a color, but where pens have an attribute for defining a line style, such as dashed or solid, a brush has an attribute for a fill pattern, such as solid, hatched, weave, or trellis. When drawing text, a solid brush is usually sufficient. You can create brushes in much the same way as you create pens, or you can use one of the standard brushes available from the System.Drawing.Brushes class.

A Font object defines characteristics used to format text, including the character set (Times New Roman, Courier, for example), size (point size), and style (bold, italic, normal, underline, and so on). To create a new Font object, you could use code such as the following:

Font objFont;
objFont = new System.Drawing.Font("Arial", 30);

The text Arial in this code is the name of a font installed on my computer. In fact, Arial is one of the few fonts installed on all Windows computers. If you supply the name of a font that doesn't exist, C# will use a default font. The second parameter is the point size of the text. If you want to use a style other than normal, you can provide a style value as a third parameter, like this:

objFont = new System.Drawing.Font("Arial Black", 30,FontStyle.Bold);

or

objFont = new System.Drawing.Font("Arial Black", 30,FontStyle.Italic);

In addition to creating a Font object, you can also use the font of an existing object, such as a Form. For example, the following statement prints text to a Graphics object using the font of the current form:

objGraphics.DrawString("This is the text that prints!",
                        this.Font,System.Drawing.Brushes.Azure, 0, 0);

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