Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 was released this week and I noticed a change in font rendering.

VS2010 uses WPF for the presentation layer which brings a lot of nice improvements. Better window redrawing, multi-monitor support, and accelerated graphics but it also introduces a significant change in how fonts are drawn on the screen. WPF uses a separate rendering engine to draw glyphs. This allows for some great transform effects, scaling, etc.

Here is a comparison of the same code block with my default color scheme in VS2008 and VS2010:

VS 2008

VS2010

When you compare the images you can see that VS2010 renders Consolas 14pt much bolder than VS2008. To me the text seems “blurry” and harder to read than in 2008. That’s a big deal if you spend hours at a time working with text.

I also noticed that the line height is slightly larger in VS2010. This means that I’m getting a few less lines on screen than before. That can also be a big deal for productivity.

It looks like Microsoft needs to make some WPF changes or I need to find a new font that is optimized for code work in VS2010. The ironic part is that Microsoft created the consolas font specifically for working on code in Microsoft tools!