Any Developer working in the XAML Environment must have stumbled across Microsoft Blend, a.k.a. Expression Blend at some time. Blend is a Software aimed to support developers and designers of XAML based UIs create designs and animations, apply behaviors and so forth. As of 2010 (talking VS Versions), Microsoft has made the licensing of Blend a real mess, if you're a WPF Developer: The only way to purchase Blend is buying the entire Expression Studio Ultimate for somewhere around 500 Euros. Smaller development teams are made to bleed unnecessarily, since the VS 2010 XAML editor had serious issues before SP1. We're talking 2012 now - seems MS have learned their lesson: Blend is free for Windows 8 Store Apps and comes along with the correlating Visual Studio Express Edition. But what about WPF or the already zombified Silverlight? Good news first: Blend will continue to support WPF. But what are the licensing terms? Looking things up on the Blend Insider Blog , I fo...
WPF has a lot of advantages, it's perfectly sane data binding mechanism being one of the most outstanding ones.On the flipside, many people (meaning companies, mostly) have refused to switch from WinForms to WPF because of the "blurry" looks of applications written in WPF.
This blurryness goes back to two mechanisms:
1)Text Smoothing
Instead of relying on the system's ClearType mechanism, WPF does it's own thing-a-magic, which is blatantly inferior to the aforesaid. In fact, WPF smoothed fonts are a definite way to headaches, if read for some time.
Note : The image is from a website that compares various Microsoft.Net Font-Smoothing implementations.
They might be useful to integrate text in images, though.For business applications (displaying data grids etc.) this is a K.O. criterion. Nobody wants to have to take their glasses off in order to achieve readability, and nobody wants their software deployed along with a pack of aspirins.
2)SubPix...
To complete my MCTS, I currently study for 70-505. As I said about 70-536, the SPT is the best way to learn. Here comes the but: The mock exam is so faulty that you have to be very careful using it.I will update this post once Microsoft has put up a knowledge base site for this book and my errors have been submitted. UPDATE : And here it is! Edit : After having taken the exam yesterday, I can tell for sure that using only the Self Paced Training Kit may result in a somewhat close call. Sure it helped me get through, but not as good as 70-536 (Score : 828). I think the Microsoft Official Classroom Course may have been of some use, eventually...Anyway, now I have the right to officially use these credentials: If that ain't hot...
Kommentare
Kommentar veröffentlichen