VS2010 Advancing WPF 4?
Many developers expected Microsoft's use of WPF in the VS2010 shell to advance the Windows graphics subsystem and it appears they were right.
WPF 4 offers numerous updates to the text stack, many of which can be seen first hand in the VS2010 beta 2 code editor. Early adopters should notice the improved quality in the text rendering and formatting in the IDE – no more blurry text! The WPF text, flow and layout improvements were not in WPF 4 Beta 1.
In WPF 4 Beta 2, developers now have TextFormattingMode and TextRenderingMode (ideal and display) in addition to ClearType, the only option in WPF 3.5.
"Text can now be formatted to either strictly adhere to font specifications or fall on pixel boundaries. This new option allows text to be rendered more clearly at the slight expense of glyph shape and position," explains Microsoft's Chipalo Street in his WPF Text blog.
Run.Text is now a dependency property (Bindable Run API) with support for one-way data binding. The color of text and carets for text boxes is now supported with a CaretBrush API and Selection Brush API.
Finally, Microsoft has tried to address the problem of sub-pixel positioning of elements in WPF layouts with a new LayoutRounding feature. "Enabling LayoutRounding forces the WPF layout engine to place elements on whole pixel boundaries, thus removing most of the rendering artifacts caused by this problem," writes Street, who also discusses the text quality improvements in a Channel 9 video.
What's your take on the look and feel of VS2010 beta 2? Is Microsoft advancing WPF 4 fast enough? Express your thoughts below or drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 10/28/2009 at 5:33 PM