R2016R4 issues in Window10

General
1

I just installed R2016R4 on a Windows 10 machine and to my surprise I immediately experienced a multitude of issues. I can’t believe that Xojo released this version for the Windows platform.

Many things that are supposed to have transparency are now opaque, even in the GUI of Xojo itself. However, the biggest problem for me is that none of the soft declared GDIPlus API procedures are working anymore. And I use these a lot, such GdipDrawLinesI to draw dotted and dashed lines, as well as for other graphics artifacts that are unavailable or do not work well in Xojo.

So it’s back to 2016.R3. I Assume that the GDIPlus API call problem is caused by the introduction of Direct2D. Question is: Is this going to be solved?

2

Make sure you file a feedback report. That’s the best way to have it looked at and, hopefully, solved.

3

You obviously do not read teh release notes (nor the docs recent changes).

GDI+ have been deprecated.

What problem not related to GDI + do you have ?

4

Soft declares should still work…

5

You can use GDI+ along side Direct2D, but you have to change the way you do it. I don’t know if Xojo exposes the graphics context such that you can or not. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd370971(v=vs.85).aspx

6

Wow. That’s a little unexpected to have something being depreciated for which there is not really an alternative. I will see if I can render the GDI content to the Direct2D render target. Does look rather complicated.

I will inspect the other issues I encountered and report feedback cases. I did read the release

7

Yes. This was a major change on the Windows side of things.

8

Deprecated does not mean removed, and it should still work.

9

UseGDIPlus is deprecated in the sense that you can still build code that references the property without a compilation error. But the Windows graphics framework is now entirely built around the more modern Direct2D- so there really isn’t much sense in setting an old property that doesn’t mean anything to the modern graphics in 2016r4+. Any GDI/GDI+ specific declares of course, may have to be updated, since the framework itself no longer uses GDI/GDI+.

Like macOS, we now use modern drawing at all times and users don’t have to think about when GDI+ should be used vs GDI anymore.

11

I do not saw the “Use GDI+” + Switch in 2016r4 IDE. (in the Windows Target, of course).