Hi guys

first of all thank you for your nice website .

I need help with a problem : I need to draw rectangles on a Canvas in WPF (C# or VB.NET - Language Doesn't matter)

But only way I know to do that is to define rectangles and add them as children to the canvas.

I want to do it just like GDI+ in Windows Forms , How to do it ???

thanks for your help.

You make a rectangle and add it to the canvas' children.

var myRect = new System.Windows.Shapes.Rectangle();
myRect.Stroke = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Black;
myRect.Fill = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.SkyBlue;
myRect.HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Left;
myRect.VerticalAlignment = VerticalAlignment.Center;
myRect.Height = 50;
myRect.Width = 50;

myParentCanvas.Children.Add(myRect);

I suspect that using WPF drawing techniques is faster than GDI+ simply because WPF can take advantage of the graphics card to do drawing, as opposed to GDI+ which is bitmap based.

(I have not personally measured them though)

If you really want to use GDI+ like techniques, you can look into using a WPF image control, DrawingVisual, and RenderTargetBitmap as shown here:

<Grid>
    <Image Name="Background"
           Width="200"
           Height="200"
           VerticalAlignment="Center"
           HorizontalAlignment="Center" />
</Grid>

Code-behind for the window:

private RenderTargetBitmap buffer;
private DrawingVisual drawingVisual = new DrawingVisual();

public MainWindow()
{
    InitializeComponent();            
}

protected override void OnRender(DrawingContext drawingContext)
{
    base.OnRender(drawingContext);
    buffer = new RenderTargetBitmap((int)Background.Width, (int)Background.Height, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);
    Background.Source = buffer;
    DrawStuff();
}

private void DrawStuff()
{
    if (buffer == null)
        return;

    using (DrawingContext drawingContext = drawingVisual.RenderOpen())
    {
        drawingContext.DrawRectangle(new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red), null, new Rect(0, 0, 10, 10));
    }

    buffer.Render(drawingVisual);
}

(stolen from StackOverflow)

If you really want to use GDI+ itself, you could also look into hosting a Windows Forms control in WPF and drawing on it.

thanks man I was looking for this ...