Drawing Tutorial for Visual C++ 2005

EE 5340/7340: Biomedical Instrumentation

Carlos E. Davila

Electrical Engineering Dept, SMU

There are a number of tutorials for using Visual C++ 2005 on the Microsoft web page. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any complete tutorials that walk you through a drawing task step by step from beginning to end. The following tutorial does that.

1. Start up Visual C++ 2005 and from the “File” menu, select “New” and then click on “Project”. You will see the following window:

2. Under “Project types” click on “CLR” and then under “Visual studio installed templates” select “Windows Forms Application”.
3. Enter a project name and click “OK”.
4. At this point you will see the Visual C++ IDE window, consisting of a “Solution Explorer” frame with some pre-existing files already in place. You will also see “Form1.h[Design]” window which contains a rudimentary form titled “Form1”.
5. Right-click anywhere on “Form1” and select the “Properties” item in the context menu. On the right side of the IDE, you will see a table of Form properties.
6. Click on the “Events” icon on top of the “Form1” properties window (the small thunderbolt). This will list a series of events that you can write event handlers for.

1. In the box immediately to the right of “Paint” write down the name of the Paint event handler, call it something like “On_paint” and press “Enter”. This will generate the skeleton for the event handler in a new tab titled “Form1.h”. This is the header file that contains all of the class declarations for the Form. The skeleton for the “On_draw” paint handler looks like this:

private: System::Void On_paint(System::Object^ sender, System::Windows::Forms::PaintEventArgs^ e) {

}

the variable “e” is a handle to the Graphics object associated with the form. The Graphics class enables you do draw on Forms.

2. At this point, you can proceed with any one of the drawing examples given in the Microsoft web page. For example if you go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x1d5a9f2.aspx, you will see an example of drawing several shapes. Change the Graphics object handle “e” to “pe” and enter (i.e. copy and paste) the following code in your “On_paint” hander:

private: System::Void On_paint(System::Object^ sender, System::Windows::Forms::PaintEventArgs^ pe) {

Graphics^ g = pe->Graphics;

g->Clear(Color::AntiqueWhite);

Rectangle rect = Form::ClientRectangle;

Rectangle smallRect;

smallRect.X = rect.X + rect.Width / 4;

smallRect.Y = rect.Y + rect.Height / 4;

smallRect.Width = rect.Width / 2;

smallRect.Height = rect.Height / 2;

Pen^ redPen = gcnew Pen(Color::Red);

redPen->Width = 4;

g->DrawLine(redPen, 0, 0, rect.Width, rect.Height);

Pen^ bluePen = gcnew Pen(Color::Blue);

bluePen->Width = 10;

g->DrawArc( bluePen, smallRect, 90, 270 );

}

Then build and run the program.