Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 16 ■ PROGRAMMING SILVERLIGHT WITH XAML AND JAVASCRIPT 387
When using strokes, you have a number of other properties that you can use to finetune
their appearance.
The width of your stroke is set using the width property. When painting a stroke with
something like a gradient brush, it is hard to see the gradient if your stroke is only 1 pixel
wide, so it’s very straightforward to change the width and have the brush show up a lot
better.
The way the stroke is drawn is configured using the StrokeDashArray, StrokeDashCap,
and StrokeDashOffset properties. The StrokeDashArray specifies how you would like the
line broken into dashes by configuring it using an array of double values. This is a commaseparated
list of values in which you set a value for the stroke length, followed by a value
for the space length, and then repeat as necessary. For example, if you want your dash to
be 3 units long, followed by a space 1 unit long, followed by a dash 2 units long, followed
by a space 1 unit long, you would use a dash array that contains “3,1,2,1.”
If you use this method and you have a large width on your lines, you’ll see that your
lines are in fact rectangles with sharp corners. You can change this using the StrokeDashCap
property, which allows you to set your dashes to have the following end caps:
Flat: The default value, where the line ends flat, giving squared-off corners
Round: Specifies that the end cap is a semicircle with the same diameter as the line
thickness
Triangle: Specifies an isosceles triangle end cap, where the base length equals the
thickness of the stroke
If you are drawing a shape that has sharp turns on it, such as the corners of a rectangle,
you may notice that the dashes do not join up cleanly in many cases due to their dash
array not lining up with the specified widths of the shape. To control this a little better,
you can specify how strokes will join up with each other when they go through a turn.
This is set using the StrokeLineJoin property. You can set this to have the following join
types: