Silverlight comes of age
As a long time Flash/.NET programmer, Silverlight has always been of interest to me. However, apart from a little pong game we made when it was still WPFE, I’ve never taken the trouble to delve into this new tech too deeply. The main reason has always been that these things tend to be both frustrating and disappointing in their first couple of years of life. APIs change and break your code, and essential features are broken or missing. All in all, developing with a mature platform is much more satisfying and rewarding.
For Silverlight, it was the lack of support for dynamic bitmaps, and the appallingly bad font rendering that screamed ‘Not ready!’ through versions 1 and 2. The look of the text reminded me of Linux windowing systems before they recently got their act together.
In fact, the font rendering was so bad that it sparked discussions such as this and this.
People did come up with some ingenious hacks for the bitmap problem, but really you don’t want to have to do this sort of thing. And as this quote from the Silverlight forums sums up, crappy font rendering is not an option if Silverlight is ever going to compete with Flash.
Fonts look like crap in Silverlight. Doesn’t matter what font I use, if I embed it or what, they look like crap. Even companies like DevExpress, Telerik and Componentone’s samples for their new controls look like crap because of the fonts.
This is just imbarrassingly bad. Is there a way to make them look like they should? Is this going to be fixed?
It sure should be fixed for the final version, cause otherwise Adobe and company are going to laugh you out of the room.
Geminiman
Fortunately MS appears to have understood the concerns here and Silverlight 3 has Cleartype as well as WritableBitmap
Looks like old Silverpants is starting to get with the program. Maybe I should too.
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July 26th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Yeah Microsoft is kind of slow on this but they are getting there. I am starting to think that time to check silverlight is pretty close. Tough there are not many reasons do do it still as aside from C# .Net(with all those benefits) benefits there are not many others that make it interesting for Flash developer. Tough WPF style UI design makes me very curious lately. So I am thinking on taking courses may be this or next year to see WPF in action and probably check Silverligh too.