Color

The world is a colorful place, and in VB.NET we can represent these colors with the Color type. This type is part of the System.Drawing namespace.

The System.Drawing namespace is available on .NET on all platforms, including Windows, macOS and Linux. It makes working with colors easier.

Example

To begin, we must use the "imports" keyword at the top to bring in the System.Drawing namespace. This makes the program compile correctly.

Step 1 On the Color Shared class, we can access different named colors like AliceBlue, a light blue shade.

Step 2 For debugging purposes, we can print the color local variable to the Console.

Step 3 The Color internally keeps track of its ARGB data (which is alpha, red, gree and blue). With properties we can access this information.

Step 4 We print information about the brightness, hue and saturation of the color (which is AliceBlue for this example).

imports System.Drawing

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Step 1: get a color with the Color type.
        Dim color as Color = Color.AliceBlue

        ' Step 2: print color.
        Console.WriteLine(color)

        ' Step 3: print ARGB data.
        Console.WriteLine(color.ToArgb())
        Console.WriteLine(color.A)
        Console.WriteLine(color.R)
        Console.WriteLine(color.G)
        Console.WriteLine(color.B)

        ' Step 4: print brightness, hue and saturation data.
        Console.WriteLine(color.GetBrightness())
        Console.WriteLine(color.GetHue())
        Console.WriteLine(color.GetSaturation())
    End Sub
End ModuleColor [AliceBlue]
-984833
255
240
248
255
0.9705882
208
1

`FromName`

Suppose we have a name for a color like "white" or "yellow." We can convert this an actual Color type instance with the FromName function.

imports System.Drawing

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Get color from a string.
        Dim yellow as Color = Color.FromName("yellow")
        ' Print RGB values for the color.
        Console.WriteLine(yellow.R)
        Console.WriteLine(yellow.G)
        Console.WriteLine(yellow.B)
    End Sub
End Module255
255
0

The Color type in VB.NET provides many properties to learn more about a specific color. We can convert colors from Strings with FromName.