Home and Learn: Intermediate Programming

How to Draw an Ellipse with Code

Graphics Tutorials: For C# and VB NET Students

In the previous lesson, you saw how to draw a rectangle on your forms. In this lesson, you'll see how to draw an ellipse.

Ellipses are drawn in between the sides of rectangles. They are drawn like this:

An ellipse drawn inside a rectangle

Erase the sides of the rectangle and you're left with an ellipse.

So add another button to your form. Double click to get at the coding window. Set up a second Rectangle variable at the top of the code, just below rectangle1:

VB Net

Dim rectangle2 As Rectangle

Rectangle rectangle1;

Add the following line to the button code in VB:

rectangle2 = New Rectangle(10, 10, 150, 100)

And this, in C#:

rectangle2 = new Rectangle(10, 10, 150, 100);

So the width of the rectangle will be 150 and the height 100. Now set up the Pen, just below the rectangle line:

pen1 = New Pen(Color.DarkBlue, 2)

pen1 = new Pen(Color.DarkBlue, 2);

Add a new drawOption, and then Invalidate command with these two lines (semicolons on the end in C#):

drawOptions = 3
Invalidate( )

Jump to your Paint event and add a new Case in VB:

Case 3

e.Graphics.DrawEllipse( pen1, rectangle2 )

And this in C#:

case 3:

e.Graphics.DrawEllipse( pen1, rectangle2 );
break;

This time, we're selecting DrawEllipse from the list of available Graphics Subroutines. In between the round brackets of DrawEllipse, you need a Pen, followed by the rectangle that you want to turn into an ellipse.

Run your programme and click your Ellipse button. Your form will then look like this one:

An ellipse drawn on a user form with the click of a button

As you can see, though, the ellipse looks a little bit ragged. This is because of something called Aliasing. If you try to draw a curve onto a computer screen, it will get drawn in a grid. Like this:

An example of Aliasing on an ellipse

The Alias part is all those little steps – the jaggies, as they are known. Anti-Aliasing is filling in the steps to create a smooth curve. You can implement this in your code quite easily, with the SmoothingMode property. Add the following, just above your DrawEllipse line, but below Case 3 (again, semicolon on the end in C#):

e.Graphics.SmoothingMode = Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias

If you get any underlines, especially in C#, change the part after the equals sign to this:

System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias;

Your Select Case code should now look like this in VB Net:

Visual Basic .NET code to use AntiAlias on an ellipse