In this post we are going to talk about what’s new in Windows Forms runtime in .NET 6.0 Preview 5.

Application-wide default font

.NET Framework and Windows Forms were designed and built in a completely different world from today – back when CRT monitors still largely maxed out at 1024×768, and “Microsoft Sans Serif” was the default font on Windows.

However, nothing is ever set in stone, and even fundamental properties like default font change once in a while. Windows Vista received a fair share of UI updates, including the default font, which was changed to Segoe UI. But this wasn’t something that could be changed in .NET Framework, and it continued using Microsoft Sans Serif as the default font.

Fast forward to 2018 and .NET Core 3.0, where we were finally able to start modernizing Windows Forms. We changed the font to Segoe UI in dotnet/winforms#656, and quickly learned that a great number of things depended on this default font metrics. For example, the designer was no longer a true WYSIWYG, because Visual Studio process is run under .NET Framework 4.7.2 and uses the old default font, whereas a .NET application at runtime uses the new font. (Before you ask, we are working on a feature that will address this discrepancy.)

#windows forms #winforms #dotnet #dotnet core #dotnet 6 preview