New Post: [How-to] Colorize individual shapes

A lot of questions on the MapWindow/MapWinGIS forums are about the new categories. They are very powerful but for some simple tasks it was not so easy.

A few days ago Sergei introduced a few new methods to make it easier to assign a custom category to a shape.
These new methods made it in the Stable Release which I published just a minute ago. Go to the download section of this site.

We've created a C# example and a VB.NET example.
The C# version can be downloaded here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/TestingScripts/TestColorUniqueShapes.cs
The VB.NET code is:

    Dim sf As Shapefile = New Shapefile()

    If sf.Open("C:\Users\Meems\Desktop\United States\Shapefiles\lakes.shp") Then
      Dim utls As Utils = New Utils()

      Dim ctOrange As ShapefileCategory = sf.Categories.Add("Orange")
      ctOrange.DrawingOptions.FillColor = utls.ColorByName(tkMapColor.Orange)

      Dim ctBlue As ShapefileCategory = sf.Categories.Add("Blue")
      ctBlue.DrawingOptions.FillColor = utls.ColorByName(tkMapColor.Blue)

      For i As Integer = 0 To sf.NumShapes - 1
        If i Mod 2 = 0 Then
          sf.ShapeCategory2(i) = "Orange"
        Else
          sf.ShapeCategory3(i) = ctBlue
        End If
      Next i

      For i As Integer = 0 To sf.NumShapes - 1
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print("Shape category: {0}, {1}", i, sf.ShapeCategory2(i))
      Next i

      For i As Integer = 0 To sf.NumShapes - 1
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print("Shape category: {0}, {1}", i, sf.ShapeCategory3(i).Name)
      Next i

      ' Add the data to the map:
      AxMap1.AddLayer(sf, True)
    End If

Please download the latest installer and update your project.
If you have questions, please post them here and we'll try to answer them.