Draw over controls

[Brandon Arnold]

I have a panel that contains a label and a picturebox. When clicked, I
want to draw a rectangle over everything. I can draw the rect and set
the color, no big deal. The problem is because I have to pass the rect
of the panel, it draws on that, and under the other controls. How can
I force it to draw OVER everything else? Ideally this would also be
trackable since the whole thing(panel and children) will be dragable.
This is what i've got right now:

Graphics gfx = selectedCtrl.CreateGraphics();
gfx.FillRectangle(new SolidBrush(Color.FromArgb(100, Color.Crimson)),
selectedCtrl.ClientRectangle);

Where selectedCtrl is the control that was clicked.

Thanks,
Brandon

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[Pavel Minaev]

On Aug 4, 6:54*pm, Brandon Arnold <[e-mail]:

I have a panel that contains a label and a picturebox. When clicked, I
want to draw a rectangle over everything. I can draw the rect and set
the color, no big deal. The problem is because I have to pass the rect
of the panel, it draws on that, and under the other controls. How can
I force it to draw OVER everything else? Ideally this would also be
trackable since the whole thing(panel and children) will be dragable.

You shouldn't really draw outside Paint events, because other controls
can decide to redraw at arbitrary moment of time, and will erase your
changes. Instead, just create an empty Panel of the desired color, and
place it where you want your rectangle to be displayed. If you want
some fancy filling on the panel (gradient, etc), then, instead of
changing its BackColor, handle its Paint event and paint whatever you
want in it.

[Brandon Arnold]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 09:07:36 -0700 (PDT), Pavel Minaev
<in****@gmail.comwrote:

>On Aug 4, 6:54*pm, Brandon Arnold <[e-mail]:

>I have a panel that contains a label and a picturebox. When clicked, I
want to draw a rectangle over everything. I can draw the rect and set
the color, no big deal. The problem is because I have to pass the rect
of the panel, it draws on that, and under the other controls. How can
I force it to draw OVER everything else? Ideally this would also be
trackable since the whole thing(panel and children) will be dragable.

You shouldn't really draw outside Paint events, because other controls
can decide to redraw at arbitrary moment of time, and will erase your
changes. Instead, just create an empty Panel of the desired color, and
place it where you want your rectangle to be displayed. If you want
some fancy filling on the panel (gradient, etc), then, instead of
changing its BackColor, handle its Paint event and paint whatever you
want in it.

Right now, I have all my controls and their associated labels together
in seprate panels. Adding more panels seems rather, ugly. Would it
be considered bad form to use them so liberaly? Right now i'm toying
around with that idea. I've placed a panel over the controls(and
parent panel) and when the desired control set is clicked, the overlay
panel is displayed. It works right now with solid colors being set
but i'm having an issue with transparency, but I can work that out.

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[Pavel Minaev]

On Aug 4, 8:26*pm, Brandon Arnold <[e-mail]:

Right now, I have all my controls and their associated labels together
in seprate panels. *Adding more panels seems rather, ugly. *Would it
be considered bad form to use them so liberaly?

Not really. Note also, that in .NET 3.5, there is a bunch of controls
that are specifically useful to "draw" shapes on the form -
RectangleShape, OvalShape, LineShape etc (they come from VB Power Pack
originally). If you have 3.5, you might want to use those instead of
Panel, as they are somewhat more lightweight.