Accessories for Controls Location and Size

To help users interact with a computer, your application will use Windows controls. You as the programmer will decide what control is necessary for your particular application. There are various categories of controls you can use when creating an application:

• Existing .NET Framework controls
• Custom controls created by others that you get from Microsoft, other programmers, third party control publishers, or other fellow programmers
• Custom controls or libraries that you create yourself

Before creating applications and adding controls to it, there are some accessories that the .NET Framework uses to define or control their characteristics.

A control can be visually represented on the screen by a geometric point on a coordinate system. A point is a pixel on the monitor screen, on a form, or on any object of your application. A point is represented by its coordinates with regard to the object that "owns" the point:

To identify the concept of a point, the System::Drawing namespace provides the Point structure. One of the properties of the Point structure is X, which represents the horizontal distance of the point from the top-left corner of the object that owns the point. Another property, Y, represents the vertical measurement of the point with regards to the top-left corner of the object that owns the point.

To represent the size of something, the System::Drawing namespace defines the Size structure that is equipped with two main properties. There are four characteristics that define a Size value: its location and its dimensions. A Size value must have a starting point (X, Y) just as the Point object was illustrated earlier. The Width is the distance from the left to the right borders of a Size value. The Height property represents the distance from the top to the bottom borders of a Size value:

Based on this, to create a Size object, if you know only its location (X and Y), you can use the following constructor:

public: Size(Point pt);

After declaring a variable with this constructor, you can access its Width and Height properties to complete the definition of the Size object. If you already have the location of a Size object by other means, you may not be interested in (re)defining its location. In this case, you may only want to specify the dimensions of the variable. To do this, you can use the following constructor:

public: Size(int width, int height);

Besides Size, the System::Drawing namespace also provides the SizeF structure. It uses the same properties as Size except that its members float values.

A rectangle is a geometric figure that has four sides. To support this figure, the System.Drawing namespace provides the Rectangle and the RectangleF structures. A rectangle can be represented as follows:

Like every geometric representation in your program, a rectangular figure is based on a coordinate system whose origin is located on a top-left corner. The object that "owns" or defines the rectangle also owns this origin. For example, if the rectangle belongs to a control that is positioned on a form, then the origin is on the top-left corner just under the title bar of the form, provided the form has a title bar.

To completely represent it, a rectangle is defined by its location and its dimensions. The location is defined by a point on the top-left corner of the rectangle. The distance from the left border of the object that owns the rectangle to the left border of the rectangle is represented by a property called Left. The distance from the top border of the object that owns the rectangle to the top border of the rectangle is represented by a property called Top. The distance from the left to the right borders of the rectangle is represented by a property called Width. The distance from the left to the right borders of the rectangle is represented by a property called Height. The distance from the left border of the object that owns the rectangle to the right border of the rectangle is represented by a property called Right. The distance from the top border of the object that owns the rectangle to the bottom border of the rectangle is represented by a property called Bottom. Based on this, a rectangle can be illustrated as follows:

To create a rectangle, you must provide at least its location and dimensions. The location can be represented by a Point value and the dimensions can be represented with a Size value. Based on this, you can use the following constructor to declare a Rectangle variable:

public: Rectangle(Point location, Size size);

This constructor requires that you define a Point and a Size in order to use it. If instead you know the integer values of the location and dimensions, you can use the following constructor to declare a Rectangle object:

public: Rectangle(int x, int y, int width, int height);

At any time, you can access or retrieve the characteristics of a Rectangle object as illustrated in the above picture from its properties. You use the same names we used in the picture.

Besides the Rectangle structure, the System::Drawing namespace provides the RectangleF structure that uses the same definition as Rectangle, except that it is defined with float values instead of integers.