Earlier, which is, almost a year ago, I was comparing owner-draw programming in Delphi and C# and concluded that it’s quite similar: basically you set any visual component in a particular mode (‘I’m going to take care of drawing the content’) and then you basically override the component’s OnPaint/OnDraw event. Drawing the actual stuff is the hardest part, but there’s pretty good API help for both Win32 and .Net platforms. If you have programmed graphics in Win32 before, this is going to be a piece of pie.
So, yeah: a couple of years ago, I did some fancy stuff in a Delphi Drawgrid component. The .Net framework has a similar ‘grid’ like component, which is called a ‘Datagridview’ and you probably guessed it: it has basically the same functionality and offers the (almost) the same features as Delphi’s DrawGrid component. This brings me to that earlier mentioned project I was working on: a Sudoku puzzle generator, which obviously needed to use a custom grid-like component with a lot of colours (Warning: if you’re not interested in programming, you probably don’t want to continue reading).