Basic overview of drawing in C#

How to use the Graphics class to draw to the screen in C#

The Graphics class is one of the fundamental classes used in programming with Windows Forms and GDI+. Through the Graphics class, you gain access to information about the display resolution and device capabilities. In this article, you’ll learn about the Paint event and how it supplies you regarding an adequately initialized Graphics object. This article also covers the most common operations performed using the Graphics object.

The first thing we will do is open Visual Studio and click “Create a new project” to get started. We are going to create a new Windows Form in C#. You could choose any project name you would like and its destined location on your desktop/pc. 

A blank project will be generated to serve as your canvas. You could change the width and height based on your preference. The next thing we need to handle is the paint event for the form. When the form is drawing itself, it will call this paint event, and then inside of that, we will get a handle to the graphics object. Afterward, we could paint the form ourselves. It is a step-by-step process that we need to accomplish. 

Declare a new graphics object with this syntax above. With this step, we could make new shapes like rectangles. 

How to draw a rectangle

To draw rectangles and squares in C#, the GraphicsObject provides the DrawRectangle() method. There are two ways to use the DrawRectangle() method. We will begin by drawing a rectangle without a pre-created Rectangle object.

• The first step is to create a new brush. The syntax above is the code that you can use to alter the color and name of the brush.

• It also needs the coordinates of the rectangle you want to create. To do that, you can encode the x, y coordinates like in the syntax attached. 

• Since we’ve used 100×100 as the coordinates, it came out as square, but you could change the coordinates to generate your desired shape.

For the second method

• To draw a rectangle, you will draw four lines. We will make a drawing pin and set that equal a new pen in this method. You could also set the color for your rectangle. The syntax above is the example that will generate your rectangle. 

How to draw a circle

Ellipses and circles are drawn in C# using the DrawEllipse() method of the GraphicsObject class. 

We made a drawing scene representing the “sun,” a circle in one of our examples. 

• You could declare a “new brush” to create the round object. The syntax above shows the various brushes for different objects: the ground and the sun in the said scene.

• An ellipse will be generated using the declared sun brush and filled with this syntax in the next step.

How to draw a line

Lines are drawn in C# using the DrawLine() method of the Graphics Object. This method takes a pre-instantiated Pen object and two sets of x and y coordinates (the start and endpoints of the line) as arguments.

A “ground” was made to complete the drawing scene in the example. A straight line represents it. 

Coordinates were also filled up to determine the width, height, and length to set up the ground.

The next step in this project is to try drawing a person! A stickman person, to be exact. It will be composed of a circle for its head, a line for its limbs and body.

• We added another drawing pen to change its color, white. 

In the syntax above, we tried to make a whole component to make a stickman. With various lines and objects, it resulted in the image below. 

The background is also changed to the color blue! And there you go, a scene with a stickman was made using simple objects and lines. 

How to draw an image

To draw an image, it will require creating a bitmap from the file. To do this, the syntax below will help to run the image.  We will use the image above as the background for our generated image.

The syntax above draws the image, but the problem is that our form and image aren’t the exact sizes.  We could stretch the image to fit the form by doing a new rectangle.

The image will be stretched to fit the form better with this code. 

We will also try to attach some images to the scene. We will do next to draw an image bitmap from the file again. 

The attached image is quite big, so you could opt for a smaller size of the image you want. 

This is the revised image of the cat once you’ve scaled it correctly. 

Here is the complete syntax for the background and the cat. Make sure to layer your drawings correctly to make them appear in the correct order. After the cat image, we will draw the bird. 

Here is the image after the code for the bird image is generated and run. 

To add an extra effect, we will add a line object in the scene. 

The last thing that we will add to this project is text. To include text in your image, follow this syntax below. Make sure to set a font style first!

The text is added and repeated three times. The project is done!

This article shows how various graphical objects can be drawn within a drawing programmatically using C#. It may be quite challenging, but first but with troubleshooting, patience, and creativity, you could also finish a project in no time!

In this article, we will discuss how to use Microsoft’s Speech Recognition Engine to write a virtual assistant application. Speech recognition apps are the way of the future and they are actually easy to write using Microsoft.Speech Recognition.

Speech Recognition Operations

A speech recognition application will typically perform the following basic operations:

• Start the speech recognizer.
• Create a recognition grammar.
• Load the grammar into the speech recognizer.
• Register for speech recognition event notification.
• Create a handler for the speech recognition event.

Free Speech Recognition API

If you are looking for a free solution for a hobby application or if you’re just trying to get your MVP built for your application, this is a nice place to start. You could swap over the code later to use for more expensive APIs available.

In this video, I also referenced Microsoft documentation, you could access this through this link. We used this example, they also have a console app built here. 

The first step is to add the following line.

microsoft.speech.recognition

You need to import the speech recognition engine first and to do that, adding the reference is a must. Navigate to your Solution Explorer and find “References” and search for speech. 

You need to add a reference to the System.Speech assembly, which is located in the GAC.

This is the only reference needed. It contains all of the following namespaces and classes. The System.Speech.Recognition namespace contains the Windows Desktop Speech technology types for implementing speech recognition.

Before you can use the Microsoft SpeechRecognitionEngine, you have to set up several properties and invoke some methods. The next step now is to create a new recognizer. In the video, at the top of my class, I’ve created an empty object for the recognizer. 

// Create an in-process speech recognizer for the en-US locale.  
recognizer = new SpeechRecognitionEngine(new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US"));

On load, I have the following code.

loadSpeechRecognition(); 

This is a function that has the loading code for the recognizer. We create a new speech recognition engine and pass it as a language because this works in multiple languages. 

private void loadSpeechRecognition()
{
    // Create an in-process speech recognizer for the en-US locale.  
    recognizer = new SpeechRecognitionEngine(new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US"));

    var gb = new GrammarBuilder(getChoiceLibrary());
    var g = new Grammar(gb);
    recognizer.LoadGrammar(g);

    // Add a handler for the speech recognized event.  
    recognizer.SpeechRecognized += new EventHandler<SpeechRecognizedEventArgs>(recognizer_SpeechRecognized);

    // Configure input to the speech recognizer.  
    recognizer.SetInputToDefaultAudioDevice();

    // Start asynchronous, continuous speech recognition.  
    recognizer.RecognizeAsync(RecognizeMode.Multiple);
}

Instantiate your recognizer and then you are going to build this choice library.

If you look back to the SpeechRecognitionEngine Class that is linked in this article, they created a list of choices. In your application, you may create a function that returns a list of choices.

    public Choices getChoiceLibrary()
    {
        Choices myChoices = new Choices();
        //greetings
        myChoices.Add("hey " + Agent.charName);
        myChoices.Add("hi " + Agent.charName);
        myChoices.Add("hello " + Agent.charName);
        myChoices.Add("bye " + Agent.charName);
        myChoices.Add("thanks " + Agent.charName);
        //open things
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open notepad");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open youtube");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open excel");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open discord");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open davinci");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " play some music");

        //Rocket
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say nice shot");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say sorry");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say no problem");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say thanks");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say great pass");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " say good game");

        //Chrome
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " close this tab");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " refresh this tab");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open gmail");

        //close things
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " close notepad");

        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " lets play chess");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " open chess");

        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " move");
        myChoices.Add(Agent.charName + " move somewhere else");
        return myChoices;
    }

This code creates a new “choices” object and then adds your choices to it.

These pertain to the words the user can say. Make sure to add a list of choices because it heightens the accuracy of your command. 

After you have built your set of choices, it will return back over here to this grammar builder. This is where you can tell the API how a sentence should look.

The next step is the speech recognized event handler.

    public void recognizer_SpeechRecognized(object sender, SpeechRecognizedEventArgs e)
    {
       bombini.processSpeech(e.Result.Text);
    }

This action is what your recognition engine hears (something that matches with one of the choices), it will call whatever function you have built. I have it calling a function with a few different commands that it can run.

public void processSpeech(string speechText)
    {
        string currWinTitle = currentWindow.GetActiveWindowTitle();
        switch (speechText)
        {
            //open things
            case charName + " open excel":
                myActions.startProcess("excel.exe", "");
                myActions.animate(gestures.Write);
                break;
            case charName + " open notepad":
                myActions.startProcess("notepad.exe", "");
                myActions.animate(gestures.Write);
                break;
            case charName + " open youtube":
                myActions.startProcess("chrome.exe", "http://youtube.com");
                myActions.animate(gestures.Search);
                break;
            case charName + " open davinci":
                myActions.startProcess("G:\\DaVinci Resolve\\Resolve.exe", "");
                myActions.animate(gestures.Search);
                break;
        }
    }

You could also take a look at “e.result.text” which is going to be the result that the recognizer will generate. 

After setting up the event handler is set to listen to input from the default audio device. This determines if it will be listening on your microphone or listening to a headset.

Once you have the above set up your application should be able to listen on the correct device.

Once you have followed all of the above steps, we can start the Speech Recognition Engine asynchronously which will begin listening on another thread. Starting the Engine asynchronously makes it keep listening constantly on a second thread instead of blocking the current thread.

That is it! There are plenty of other possibilities to use the SAPI for, perhaps you could use it for innovative projects!

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!

Today we are going to be talking about how to create a setup file in visual studio 2019! This setup file is a packaged version of your application with a wizard that will guide the user through the entire installation process. This will allow the user to install your latest build with ease!

If you have ever written an application and wanted to create an MSI or EXE installer then this is the guide for you! I’m going to go step by step and show you exactly how to create an installer!

The entire process is pretty easy and simply requires a visual studio extension that was developed by Microsoft. This extension is not a 3rd party product nor is it terribly complicated to use.

Alright, so let’s get right into it!

The first thing we’re going to need to do is to download the required extension. The extension we will need is called “Microsoft Visual Studio installer project”

You access the Manage Extensions page by clicking on Extensions and then Manage Extensions at the top

Once you are on the Manage Extensions page, search for this extension. It is one of the most downloaded extensions, so it should be at the top of the list. Go ahead and download it, then we can move on to the next step!

Next, we need to restart visual studio to get it to install the extension. Once visual studio closes this little extension installer will install the new extension.

Once the extension installer comes up hit modify and let it progress through. This can take a second to install but it doesn’t take terribly long. It should only take about a minute or so.

alright, once that has finished installing, you can open visual studio again.

Now that you have Visual studio open again, you want to open the project that you would like to create the installer for. because it’s going to be a second project inside the same solution.

alright, so now that we’ve got our extension ready to go we are going to right-click on the solution and add a new project. This new project is going to be the setup project. Search for the setup project template and choose that as your new project type.

Once you select Setup Project, give it a name and then click create. This will create a second project under your Solution with the name you provided.

If you open that project, you will be greeted with the setup project’s main screen as shown below.

Inside of this project, there will be 3 folders:

• Application folder: This is where your exe and assembly files will be placed.
• Desktop folder: This will be where we put items destined for the user’s desktop.
• User’s Program Menu: This will be where we put items to be added to the user’s program menu.

Congratulations! That is all there is to it! At this point, you should have a working setup project! I hope this guide was helpful! I’ll see you in the next one!

Hey everyone! Today we are going to be learning about While loops in C#. This is going to be a quick tutorial on how and why we use While statements and a general introduction to loops in programming.

A while loop is used to execute a block of code over and over until some condition is met.

For a simplified English example: “While the background color is red do these things.” This would do [these things] over and over until the background color is no longer red.

The while loop is very similar to a “for” loop. It will loop over and over again until the condition is met. This is the structure of a while loop:

while (condition)
{
//code to be executed
}

The main difference between a for loop and a while loop is that the while loop doesn’t increment the variable that it is testing each loop. Typically a for loop will be used when you have a set number of times something needs to happen. A while loop, on the other hand, is used when you need to loop until something is true or false.

This would be an example of a while loop that works just like a for Loop. Notice how there is a specific line to increment i, it doesn’t get incremented by the while loop itself.

Alright! let’s make a sample application!

You should now have your sample form built and it is time to start writing code. I would go ahead and run the application, just to make sure everything is working properly before we begin writing code.

Once you have verified that your application is running properly, it is time to start writing code. First double click on the Calculate button. This will create an event handler for the buttons click event. Inside of this function, we are going to write a while loop that runs from 1 to 18. Inside of this loop, we are going to have it add an item to LstItems that displays the current age. The code for that looks like this:

int age = 1;
while(age <= 18)
{
LstItems.Items.Add(age);
Age = Age + 1;
}

Alright, now that we have our code written, it’s time to give the program a whirl! Your results should look like this:

Your Listbox should now show 1 to 18!

If you want to better visualize this process, you can add a breakpoint on the while statement (by clicking the line to the left of the line numbers in Visual Studio) and use F10 to step through as the code executes. This should help you really understand what the code is doing by watching it execute line by line.

Alright, so we know how to use a while loop to count numbers, let’s create one more example. This example will read line by line through a file and when it runs out of lines the loop will end. This is something someone would use a while loop for instead of a for loop.

You will need to create a file and store a few values in it. I personally listed a few different foods in my text file and saved it to C:\Test\LoopTest.txt
My contents looked something like this:

Pizza
Hamburger
Hot Dog

Now that you have saved it somewhere, the code you will need to read this file is this:

LstItems.Items.Clear(); //This will clear our listbox out
System.Io.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader("C:\\Test\\LoopTest.txt");
String currLine = sr.ReadLine();

While(currLine != null)
{
LstItems.Items.Add(currLine);
currLine = sr.ReadLine();
}

You may have to adjust the file location the stream reader is reading from but other than that, this code should run fine.

This code will first clear your list box, then it will read through your file and add each value to the list box until it runs out of items to read. Once the StreamReader has read the last item in the file, the next ReadLine will set currLine to null and that is when our test will fail and the While loop will end.

That’s really all there is to while loops! I hope this helped and I will see you in the next one!