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C#-HatchBrush-"large" checker board hatch style not large enough

I'm trying to draw something like the transparent-indicating background when you use Photoshop or other image processing software.
Like I said in the title, I'm using HatchBrush, and the large checker board style is not large enough for me. Beyond that, I would rather like to be able to control how large each tile is based on current zoom factor or other stuff in my environment.
I have also written the code to draw a lot of filled rectangles, but this was way too slow for some reason (this allows me to control tile size though).
I have not tried Texture Brush yet, but to have a texture means I can not change the colors on the fly easily, so I would rather avoid that unless run out of options.
Is there any ways that I can configure HatchBrush or do something more basic but efficient?

I found the answer when looking at WPF. A solution was on their tutorial with brushes.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970904%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

Best way to draw moving sphere in a smooth way in C#

Hello: I am trying to create an app which will display a moving sphere. App will vary speed and direction. I've tried Adobe Flash but cannot get it smooth. Smoothness is essential in this case. So I am trying C#.
Initially, I can see that this can be implemented by:
1) Creating a PictureBox of a sphere, and using a Timer, change its coordinates. or
2) Using the this.paint function to draw a filled circle, and somehow, with a timer, erasing and redrawing it.
Can someone recommend the best path to take? I'll have a main menu where the user will chose speed/direction/how many etc... and then simply show the "game window" with the moving spheres. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
This is to be displayed on a PC only.
Thanks
-Ed

I just answered a similar question here.
NOTE: Depending on your needs, it is possible to achieve smooth animations under winforms (under certain conditions) though you are responsible for everything. wpf provides an animation framework but wpf is perhaps a milestone harder.
It probably does not matter should you pursue winforms first or WPF. You arguably could learn the basics under winforms then move over to wpf. wpf may require you to learn quite a bit before you can do anything.
Summary
Essentially what this does is to create an offscreen bitmap that we will draw into first. It is the same size as the UserControl. The control's OnPaint calls DrawOffscreen passing in the Graphics that is attached to the offscreen bitmap. Here we loop around just rendering the tiles/sky that are visible and ignoring others so as to improve performance.
Once it's all done we zap the entire offscreen bitmap to the display in one operation. This serves to eliminate:
Flicker
Tearing effects (typically associated with lateral movement)
There is a Timer that is scheduled to update the positions of all the tiles based on the time since the last update. This allows for a more realistic movement and avoids speed-ups and slow-downs under load. Tiles are moved in the OnUpdate method.
If you note in the code for Timer1OnTick I call Invalidate(Bounds); after animating everything. This does not cause an immediate paint rather Windows will queue a paint operation to be done at a later time. Consecutive pending operations will be fused into one. This means that we can be animating positions more frequently than painting during heavy load. Animation mechanic is independent of paint. That's a good thing, you don't want to be waiting for paints to occur. xna does a similar thing
Please refer to my full SO answer complete with sample code

Here are a few hints to get you going:
First you will need to come to a decision about which platform to target: WPF or Winforms.
Then you should know what to move across what; a nice Bitmap or just a circle across an empty background or a Bitmap or a Form with controls on it.
In Winforms both your approaches will work, esp. if you set a circular region see here for an example of that. (The part in the fun comment!)
And yes, a Timer is the way to animate the sphere. Btw, a Panel or even a Label can display an Bitmap just as well as a PictureBox.
For smooth movements make sure to set the Form.Doublebuffered=true, if you move across a Form. If you move across any other control (except a PictureBox or a Label) you will need to subclass it to get access to the DoubleBuffered property!
It is often also a good idea to keep the Location of a moving item in a variable as a PointF and use floats for its speed because this way you can fine grain the speed and Location changes and also the Timer Intervals!

Using GIFs with XNA

I was looking for a way to use GIFs within XNA when I found this: http://xnagif.codeplex.com/
Can anyone tell me the proper steps in adding and linking this library to my project? I couldn't get it to work when I tried it, and I feel as though I might deleted/overwrite a necessary component to my project.

As I said, spritesheet animation is much easier with spritesheet than gifs and gives you much more flexibility, like storing multiple animations in the same image file.
This nice tutorial will help you get started on spritesheet animation in XNA. It shouldn't take long for you to develop a working animation library with this.
In short, XNA already has a parameter in its Draw method that allows you to draw only a small part of the full image (parameter: source). Using this, you can change the source every X second to make it look like an animated gif. I assure you that it really isn't too complicated and shouldn't be too long to implement (as I have done it myself several times already, always improving my animation engine)

Creating an analog clock on C#

I intend in creating a few analog clocks on Visual Studio 2008 (C#) for a school project, but I'm am still a bit unsure on how show I do it..
Should I import an image of a pointer and then add the codes to it to make it spin?
Or should I use some sort of code to actually draw the pointers and move them?
EDIT:
Been looking around the internet but I am not sure on how should I begin... never used any properties on how to actually draw something on C#, can someone tell me how should I proceed to make an analog clock?

It will be easier to draw the hands than to rotate images of the hands, especially since you will need one image for each hand and the images will conflict with each other.

However you choose to do the hands (images or xaml shapes) you'd then animate them with the RotateTransform Msdn has a sample too
You could also use databinding and a timer to change the rotation every second

C#: Creating a graphical screensaver

I am thinking about creating a screen saver. I have the whole thing, its graphics and the back-end kind of ready in my head. But I am not quite sure how to get the graphics out in code.
What I would like is a slide show of images with a bit of movement (kind of like the slide show in media center) and some floating text and shapes on top. The shapes somehow translucent.
I currently have a very simple static slideshow made in WinForms. Just a simple application that goes fullscreen and displays some images and pretends to fade them in and out in a hackish kind of way. But it is not very well made, and the performance is not very good. For example to prevent lag, I fade in a black square on top of the image, instead of fading in the actual image. Silly perhaps, but it kind of worked :p
Anyways, I would like to do a better job. But not sure where to start. Is WPF a good solution for this? Or should I look into DirectX or OpenGL? Is this something that could be handled well with XNA, or is that too game spesific?

WPF is not a bad idea. It takes advantage of DirectX and hardware acceleration for its animations and effects.
You will get better performance if you write this kind of stuff natively (against directx or opengl), but the cost of writing it will be much higher. It's quite possible you will not need that edge anyway.
Have a look at hanselman's baby smash (which is a full screen wpf app with animations) to get a grasp of what you can do with wpf.
Note: I did write a slide show kind of thingy in WPF way back, the key to getting this to work smoothly is loading up the images in a background thread and freezing it.

I guess XNA works well. There's a sample screensaver in C# Express, by the way.

Actually XNA works pretty well. For example: this is an (advanced) example of what can be made with XNA. The community is quite helpful and XNA has great potential.

A few weeks ago I wrote a two-part article describing how to create a Windows screen saver with GDI+. I am not displaying a slide show in my screen saver, but instead I am randomly drawing shapes. I did however explain the fundamentals of creating a screen saver for Windows which should be of some help if you have never created a screen saver before.
Create a Screen Saver Using C# – Part 1
Create a Screen Saver Using C# – Part 2

If you want to go with just GDI and GDI+, I wrote some info here about how to speed them up when rendering images and drawing them to screen. There is also fully functional screen saver source code at the above link (which I wrote myself after digging for some of the more obscure screen saver details), in case that helps.

Recently I finished with my first WPF (I wanted to see, how it can be done with WPF) screen-saver. You can check-it out on YouTube. Try to see HD-version.
Though I never tried XNA, I'm really pleased with WPF so far. Easy and flexible. But I guess you probably wouldn't get an XNA-performance (or am I wrong here?).
You can google for GDI+ or WPF ScreenSaver-templates to start with.