#240 – Shape vs. DrawingVisual

We’ve seen two ways to render custom 2D geometries–by inheriting from DrawingVisual and hosting in an UIElement or by inheriting from Shape and instancing your object directly in XAML.

You might wonder which of these methods to use for drawing custom 2D objects.

Shape is at a higher level of abstraction than DrawingVisual.  Shape provides the following functionality, beyond what you get with DrawingVisual:

• Derives from FrameworkElement, so you can include your subclass directly into a logical tree as a child of a Panel
• Takes care of things like the Pen used to render the geometry (Stroke and StrokeThickness) and the Brush used to fill the interior of the geometry

Below is an example of including several instances of a custom Shape and specifying different stroke/fill properties for each instance.

	<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
		<local:MyWeirdShape Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="2" Fill="Orange"/>
		<local:MyWeirdShape Stroke="Red" StrokeThickness="1" Fill="DimGray"/>
		<local:MyWeirdShape Stroke="Blue" StrokeThickness="10" Fill="White"/>
	</StackPanel>