Gradient Brushes Craft

A tiny .NET developer gui tool  

About

🎨 Gradient Brushes Craft 🖌️ is an unpretentious tiny application that manages and displays a gradient brush object while enabling the user to interactively play with some of its parameters.

The brush object is an instance of the PathGradientBrush or LinearGradientBrush classes. As of now, the gradient is a simple 2-colors (using the PathGradientBrush.SurroundColors or LinearGradientBrush.LinearColors properties), from which a Blend object may be attached to and modified (though limited to 3 variable positions/factors, which are hard-coded in the GUI).
If you are like me:

• think that the .Net documention isn't too verbose about the gradient parameters
• whereas the expected visual gradient result of the PathGradientBrush/LinearGradientBrush/Blend classes properties changes is not always obvious
• maybe this tool could allow you to save time while testing rendering effects.

♾️ Scope and limitations:
As of now, this tool targets the GDI+ Graphics (and is limited to), thus it may be qualified as quite old and deprecated. Indeed, the GDI is heavily used especially with the .Net Framework and/or the Windows Forms. In other words, we target the System.Drawing namespace. 

Features

• interactive edition of the main parameters (colors, gradient distribution, scale and factors related to)
• basic shapes selection
• source code excerpts according to the actual parameters and values

 

Usage

No installation is required, as long as .NET Framework is available. The target version is 4.8.

4.7.1 version: despite notice, the application should run seamlessly
4.5[.x] - 4.7 versions: the application may be used (some limitations)
4.0 and earlier versions: unsupported

That means for most of system versions from Win10, nothing should be needed.

Copy and Run the executable GradientBrushCraft.exe 🛡️

🛡️ The Windows SmartScreen undoubtedly identifies the binary as an unrecognised application from an unknown publisher. The executable isn't signed and SmartScreen infrastructure isn't really smart with small applications w/o any reputation or broadcast.
🤓 Auto-signing the executable would be quite useless. The source code is freely available, so feel free to build it or to take a look on it.

Or compile the source code and start the (sub)project GradientBrushCraft.

The C# source code is provided as a Visual Studio solution

Development notes

GUI

Windows Forms are used, which is more consistent with the GDI primitives usage goal (although it might be considered as legacy).
A second tool (or maybe an update) is foreseen to target the Presentation Framework (WPF).
However, some properties and principles between System.Drawing.Drawing2D.xxxxGradientBrush and System.Windows.Media.xxxxxGradientBrush are related, thus the tool could remain of interest.

Deployment topics

Having dependencies or installation requirements of any kind would have been boring for such a tiny tool. Besides, keeping source code in organised units is still key rule. For this reason, I chose to embed as resources and dynamically load at runtime the(my) class library(ies)

Sub-projects

The solution also hosts a few other small projects

• 🚧 DotNetInventory: is a command line that copes with .NetFX detection (a bit out of scope).
  Nothing fancy, but shall be broadened to support more features
• libBCL: is a minimalistic general purpose library dedicated to the other projects
• UnitTests: NUnit testing related to the libBCL

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0-beta.1	2025-04-03	filever(1.0.11.6)
1.0.0-beta.2	2025-04-21	filever(1.0.14.26)
	(add) shape panel background color (fixed) textures list behavior

---

 while