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Have you ever thought of having a circular button, triangular form, amoebic labels ?? Doing all these in C# is really simple and cool. All you need to do is, use the Region property of the control to change the shape. Lets try to change the shape of a button to ellipse.

• Create a new button the usual way.

System.Windows.Forms.Button myButton = new System.Windows.Forms.Button();


• Change the color of the button to distinguish it from the form’s background.

myButton.BackColor = Color.Blue; //Lets change the color


• Increase the size of the button.

myButton.Size = new Size(100, 100);


• Create a GraphicsPath object to define a custom path which will be associated with the button’s region in the next step. There are loads of methods like AddEllipse(). Try AddPloygon() which takes a set of points.

System.Drawing.Drawing2D.GraphicsPath aGraphicsPath = new System.Drawing.Drawing2D.GraphicsPath(); //The GraphicsPath class allows us to define custom paths

myGraphicsPath.AddEllipse(5, 5, 90, 90); //A big circle


• Associate the GraphicsPath with the button’s Region property.

myButton.Region = new Region(aGraphicsPath); //Associating the path made by us to the button's region


Run the application and see for your self, a rounded button. Cool, isn’t it ? Play with GraphicsPath to create custom shaped controls.

Tags: C#, Controls, UI

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under C#, Controls, UI. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.