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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1


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Its looks nice but as a first beta, it sure is darn slow in loading large projects.

It froze on me trying to load the SLN from the chromium project.

It also carries on the VB Team's tradition of unstable betas.

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Tab close buttons are finally on each tab. And the new features, especially the historical debugger, rock. Shame its not available for AnyCPU .NET projects.

But the entire app seems very slow in UI responsiveness, as if not a single man-hour spent in performance optimizations. And the UI colors seem totally out of place.

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Put it next to a native GDI program and open a menu in both, and see if you can see a difference between them. It's a well-known problem with WPF. It doesn't snap glyphs to pixel boundaries like GDI does, and the result is that you end up with inferior and blurry text, especially with smaller font sizes. This is made worse by the fact that there is no GUI interface to tweak the WPF font smoothing settings, because some people can play with those to at least make it look somewhat better (but still not great). Another huge problem is scrolling text, as their stupid text animation means it can take as much as a second for the text to become (somewhat) clear. Surely you've seen this effect in the properties listview in 2008's WPF editor? WPF can't render aliased text either, which makes it a living nightmare for people who use displays where that looks good and prefer it.

This is not something I'm making up, it is a well known issue, and a total showstopper for adoptions in many cases. Not just that, but poor text quality even makes some people physically sick.

WPF is really not that great a framework. Poor text rendering, overly complicated, difficult to make GUIs that look identical to GDI/User-based ones, extremely high resource use, etc.

WPF is meant to be used with ClearType switched *on*. However, what is the one thing most Neowinians do while in Display Properties/Advanced? Switch it off! If a feature it's actually designed to use isn't there, of course it's not going to look right. Try looking at the two again with ClearType switched on (which is the default).

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If .net 4 is coming out soon, will it be included with the Rtm release of Windows 7?

Windows 7 is in the RC stage, so no.

Anyway, I hope the WPF editor gets better. I know enough XAML to get by and do a simple application, but they have yet to come close to the ease of use of the Winforms designer.

However, what is the one thing most Neowinians do while in Display Properties/Advanced? Switch it off!

I'm not so sure that's true. High dot pitch LCD monitors look like crap without ClearType. I think most of the people here know that.

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Regarding text rendering, there are some cases where WPF can't use ClearType (strangely enough, drop-down menus seems to be one of them) so it falls back to grey-scale AA, which doesn't look that good. Outside of that though WPF's rendering beats GDI's. I couldn't get WinForms to work with a PostScript OpenType font, but in that case the situation is reversed, WPF has no problems applying ClearType, GDI is stuck doing grey-scale.

capture.png

Anyway, the most important addition (IMO) is the ability to host multiple versions of the CLR in an unmanaged process. That's been the biggest hurdle to using .NET plugins and such in older applications, like Windows Explorer, MS Office, etc.

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About font rendering in Visual Studio 2010, you guys should read this page : http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en...2-69865b6dc401/

From an MS guy : There are some substantial font quality improvements coming in WPF 4 as part of Beta2 that improve text quality crispness. These aren?t in Beta1, and the editor text will appear fuzzier than it should at lower DPI resolutions. Beta2 will have the same text editor crispness as VS08.b>

Good news !

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WPF is meant to be used with ClearType switched *on*. However, what is the one thing most Neowinians do while in Display Properties/Advanced? Switch it off! If a feature it's actually designed to use isn't there, of course it's not going to look right. Try looking at the two again with ClearType switched on (which is the default).

WPF is blurrier than GDI even with ClearType switched on. See the screenshot. The text in the projects UI and the properties panel is WPF-rendered and the text in IDE-UI and code editor is GDI rendered. Which one appears more crisp?

post-113245-1242883570_thumb.png

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About font rendering in Visual Studio 2010, you guys should read this page : http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en...2-69865b6dc401/

From an MS guy : There are some substantial font quality improvements coming in WPF 4 as part of Beta2 that improve text quality crispness. These aren?t in Beta1, and the editor text will appear fuzzier than it should at lower DPI resolutions. Beta2 will have the same text editor crispness as VS08.b>

Good news !

excellent news!

now, moving on... what else is cool and new? i'm going to play with VSTO tonigh:D:D

such a geek, lol.

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excellent news!

now, moving on... what else is cool and new? i'm going to play with VSTO tonight :D

such a geek, lol.

Try the historical debugger and the parallel stack visualizers.

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