Tired of boring backgrounds? Here are three ways of incorporating pictures
into the background of your form for any project. Try each one!Method 1: Simple picture
Simply load a picture file into the picture property of the form or paste a
previously copied picture into it (from the clipboard). This method is OK if the
form has a fixed size (because the form's Borderstyle property is set to
'fixed single') but not good on a resizable form because if the form is made
bigger than the picture it won't look good.
Method 2: Stretched Picture
This method will stretch a picture to fill the form exactly, no matter how
big or small the form is made. It's a good method to use with abstract pictures
and resizable forms, but not good for pictures that will look distorted if they
are stretched in one dimension and not the other.
Put an image control on your form and name it imgBack. Copy one of the
pictures below into the image control's picture property or use one of your own.
Set the stretch
property of the image control to true and set both the left and top
properties of the image control to zero, so that the image control is in the
top-left corner of the form. Then add this code:
Private Sub Form_Resize()
imgBack.Width = Me.Width
imgBack.Height = Me.Height
End Sub
This is easy to understand, as long as you know that 'Me' is another way of
referring to the form, without having to mention its name. Try it!
Method 3:
Choose one of the pictures above (or a picture of your own), then copy it and
paste it into the picture property of a picturebox called picTile that
you have added to your project (set the visible property of the
picturebox to false and its autosize property to true). Then just add the
following code to your project and Presto...
a beautiful tiled background. The real beauty, of course, is in the code - can
you figure out how it works?
Private Sub Form_Resize()
Me.AutoRedraw = True
For X = 0 To Me.ScaleWidth Step picTile.Width
For Y = 0 To Me.ScaleHeight Step picTile.Height
Me.PaintPicture picTile.Picture, X, Y, _
picTile.Width, picTile.Height
Next Y
Next X
End Sub
Note that:
 | 'Me' in the above code refers to the form, no matter what name the form
may have. |
| The line that ends with a space and an underscore character ' _' continues
on the next line - it is ALL ONE LINE. This trick is used to 'wrap' long
lines of code to make them easier to read. |
The code works by using a loop within a loop (the loops are said to
be 'nested'). The outer loop steps across
the width of the form with a step size equal to the width of the picturebox. The
inner loop steps down the form. Within the inner loop is an instruction
for painting a copy of the picture onto the form at the coordinates x and y
defined by the two loops. Thus copies of the picture are painted repeatedly onto
the form until the whole form is covered.
To understand the function of the autoredraw statement check the VB
help system. |
