Implementing Screen Savers in .NET

摘要

The first Windows program I ever wrote was a screen saver because I wanted to write some code that would let me do some graphical manipulation, and a screen saver seemed the ideal project. Since then, I have written many other screen savers to exercise new facilities as they are released for Windows. With this in mind, when .NET was first released, I took that as an opportunity to write yet another screen saver. .NET has a library called "Windows Forms" that provides basic windowing features. In terms of windowing, there really isn't much new in Windows Forms. Sure, there are some new controls, and it makes existing controls easier to use, but it has the same look and feel as Visual Basic Forms and is based on Win32 Windows messages, handles, and device contexts. If you are comfortable with Visual Basic, you'll be comfortable with Windows Forms. However, I came to .NET as a C++ Win32 programmer, so Windows Forms was alien to me, especially since it was not obvious how to do many of the things that came as second nature to me as a C++ programmer. In this article, I describe the screen-saver library I developed to do most of the work of a screen saver―all you have to provide is the graphics code.