Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
I believe I have mentioned before (perhaps in passing) about how WinForms 2.0 is not locked into using GDI+ for it text rendering.
This is really a good thing since the GDI+ text shaping engines have not been updated for some time, and every new lanaguage requiring a rendering engine added since XP SP2 (not to mention all of the shaping engines that have been updated since then) have been unvailable in GDI+. So the world is moving ahead and should not be held back here.
With that said, although I am 100% in favor of progress and getting the latest language support, I am not dumb enough to think that this is the only consideration. :-)
Luckily for all of us, the WinForms team isn't either!
In order to know who wins the battle for which method to call:
there is a (settable!) UseCompatibleTextRendering property on the various WinForms controls that tells the .NET Framework whether to be compatible with what was or to embrace what is and what will be.
And as a bonus (this info from the inestimable Jessica Fosler!), you can use Label.GetPreferredSize(proposedConstraints) to correctly switch between GDI/Uniscribe and GDI+.
And Bravo to all of the folks on the WinForms team for developing an clever and innovative solution with the ability to support full backwards compatibility....
Awesome!
This post brought to you by "ᠦ" (U+1826, MONGOLIAN LETTER UE)A letter whose WinForms story is significantly enhanced when combining version 2.0 and Vista!