GDI+ Architect is a designer I created for GDI+ code under the DBA name (The Modern Renaissance Group (Mrgsoft). It lets you draw objects on a canvas and generate SVG or GDI+ source code. I had moved it a while back from .NET 1.1 to 2.0, but there was a proprietary icon set which prevented me from releasing the source. I decided to just remove the icons and keep my ugly ones I created in instead.

My reason for open sourcing it is want to make sure if anyone had legacy code from the .NET 1.1 time frame that used this product, they could still get at it. While I don’t expect a lot of new development on this project, if you need help with it please contact me. It’s also interesting code you ever need to do anything with snapping, drawing, text wrapping, or anything of that sort regardless of your target platform. Even though this code is geared toward .NET GDI+, the concepts are universal. Warning though – it’s in VB.NET instead of C# as this was once my primary language.

It’s rough to look at your own code from 8 years ago. It’s missing clear separations of concerns. It’s got some “mammoth methods” that need to be torn apart and refactored. It’s littered with somewhat useless comments because I thought code wasn’t “done” until it was commented ad nauseam. Also since it’s from the 1.1 timeframe there is no use of generics, Linq, etc. In fact checking it into BitBucket today was the first time it ever saw a source control repository! My how things change.

All that aside, it shipped, was fairly bug free, and received positive feedback from customers.

If you are interested, you can get the source from BitBucket