Create drop shadow programatically where MDI control going to drop - c#

I created snap to grid to the MDI controls so i want to calculate and draw shadow where to cntrol will locate in drop.
For now i draw square (with Graphics()) where the inner control going to be droped but its looks bad, there is a good looking way to draw shadow programatiaclly in C# winforms? or any opensource control that can do something like that?

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Winforms C#: problem with image transparency

I am making chess with c sharp and visual studio 2019. I managed to generate the chessboard with panels and I am planning to use PictureBox for the chess pieces. However, despite the chess images have a transparent background, it ignores the color of the panel and uses the default background color of the form. I suspect it is due to these lines.
...
Controls.Add(newPanel);
...
Controls.Add(picturebox);
...
What it is doing is adding each newly created panel to the form and adding the picturebox (which is used for showing a chess piece) to the form. I tried adding picturebox to the panel but the location of the picturebox becomes relative to that panel. When I drag the picturebox around (at runtime), the picturebox is not visible as soon as it leaves the panel. I have seen someone implemented this successfully before but I cannot figure out how.
This is what the background color looks like when moving the picturebox around (I have methods to handle mouse up, mouse down and mouse move). Any help would be appreciated.
Drawing the shapes and putting them into a single control seems like the way to go. If I draw the grid and chess pieces instead of using controls, the background of the chess pieces show up correctly as transparent.

Transparency over multiple pictureBoxes

I have an array of picture boxes that are arranged in a square. I want to put a larger, mostly transparent picture box over the top. But when I do it covers the other picture boxes and just draws the background of the form.
Is there a way to get it to have all the other picture boxes show where it is transparent?
Transparency in WinForms isn't great. Some controls have transparency support, others don't. Some controls can be subclassed to enable this (by calling Control.SetStyle() with the SupportsTransparency flag). I believe this can be done with PictureBox.
However, transparency in all WinForms controls works by having the transparent control call its parent control to draw the background before the child control draws. This means that you cannot have two sibling controls and expect transparency on one to show through to the other. Sorry!
All that said, it would be possible to code your own workaround to support this. It would involve subclassing PictureBox and clever coding in the OnPaint override to locate sibling controls and manually trigger painting of them into in-memory bitmaps. Lots of gotchas with this approach.
Try WPF!
Here's a tip to get the desired result:
Create multiple copies of your top image.
Add each copy to the Controls of each picture box it should cover.
Adjust location of each copy according to the offset of each picture box to be covered.
So you will see every copy of your big image covering each picture box as if they were a single image.

Resizing a panel c# win forms

If you imagine a win form with a line drawn vertically down the middle. On the left i have a graph, and when you click the graph certain forms open on the right in an mdi type panel.
I am trying to figure out how to logically get this to look like a proper application should but am failing!
The whole form loads in a maximised view. I first set the panel width to 0 then when i add a form i check if the panels width is less than the forms, if it is then change the panels width to that of the forms.
This doesn't look great tho tbh, resizing makes strange things happen and i see a lot of grey. Does anyone have any ideas?
Use a SplitContainer on your main form. Ensure it's Dock property is set to Fill
Put your graph stuff on the left panel, and your other stuff on the right side.

How can I create a transparent System.Windows.Forms.Panel on top of two other already existing Panels then draw a line on my transparent panel?

I'm writing a form in C# and have several panels. I need to draw a line between two of the panels. I've found online several ways to go about this, the most promising appears to be to create a third panel, make it transparent, place it on top of my original panels and draw the line here.
I'm not able to get the panel to be transparent, even if I set its BackColor and ForeColor properties to transparent (in code or in design view of VS).
Any ideas on how to make the panel itself transparent (or not Visible) but have the line I draw on it still visible on top of everything else?
Thanks in advance.
No, it's transparent. See this by giving the form's BackgroundImage a value. You'll see it through the transparent panel. Of course, that's not the kind of transparency you want, you want stacking effects to work. There is no direct support for that.
If you want layers to work then don't use controls. Use the Paint event to draw. Now there's no problem, if you want transparency then just don't paint. Draw a line across an image simply by drawing the image first. This is also the rendering model of WPF.
You can actually do this pretty easily as your own UserControl. Here's a code example:
Drawing on top of controls inside a panel (C# WinForms)
This is similar to what you were originally attempting to do, only instead of drawing a line on top of a transparent panel, this code creates an irregularly-shaped user control (which happens to be in the irregular shape of a line).

Silverlight - Creating a canvas with auto-alignment and scale

How can i create a canvas of this kind - http://www.silverdiagram.net/Projects/SilverDiagram/SilverDiagram_Demo.aspx? I want to position the controls exactly aligned to each other. I want to help users to align it properly using auto-alignment (like visual studio) and by providing user the scale.
The Canvas is the right container to use as you can position its child control by coordinates. Your problem is more about moving elements around, which is in fact drag & drop.
You'll have to handle mouse events: MouseDown to select an item, MouseMove to detect a drag and MouseUp to drop it. During the move or at the drop, you can change the element's coordinates to auto-align it on a grid or compared to surrounding elements.
I successfully made such a project in Silverlight and used Adorners to add resize handlers to the elements.
I solved the panning and zooming question by putting the Canvas into a Viewbox, which was in a ScrollViewer. If you want to let the user control the zoom factor, apply a LayoutTransform to the Canvas (available in the Toolkit).

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