Basic Windows Painting

You can paint, just as you can draw, the Windows Way, the Basic Way, or both ways at once. The Windows Way of painting is to create GDI objects—bitmaps, icons, and metafiles—and then select them into a device context. The Basic Way of painting is to load bitmaps, icons, and metafiles into a Picture property.

Essentially, you’re dropping completed pictures onto a canvas. With previous versions of Visual Basic, it was difficult to go beyond that, and, in fact, many fine programs have been written without doing so. But we’re going to the second level of painting—blitting—after getting acquainted with the Picture class and GDI objects.