Hi people. I suck at coding, so I decided to post a request here and see if one of you smart people is able to come up with the following plugin.
What I miss in Paint.NET is the function that is present in other image editing programs: expanding and shrinking of your selection. What this does, is add a specified number of pixels to the border of the selection (adding an 'outline' of the selection to the selection) - "Expand". Or it subtracts the specified number of pixels from the selection border - "Shrink".
A very basic version of this function actually is present in the 'move selection' tool of Paint.NET, where you can expand or shrink a selection by carefully dragging the top-left and the bottom-right handles of the selection until you've added the desired amount of pixels to the border of the selection.
However, this doesn't work anymore when you're trying to manipulate more complex selections. The best example is a selection with a hole in the middle. By dragging the selection to 'expand' it, as described above, you're actually increasing the size of the hole in the middle of the selection along the way. What an 'expand selection' tool would do, is add pixels to all the borders of the selection, making the hole in the middle smaller.
I hope I've described the function clearly and that somebody can actually find the time to implement this in a plugin.
Thanks for any responses already: I'm always willing to explain more about what I'm talking about here.