Welcome to the fist part of my ‘.Net 4.0 Printing Made Easy’ series. In this part we’ll take a quick look at the .Net printing support, what it does do for us and just as important, what it doesn’t do for us.
In .Net 3.0 we were given a great new printing framework based around XPS documents. This immediately opened up a world of vector based printing where you can print your WPF vector controls and have them appear as sharp as ever, or if printing to an XPS or PDF document, your print out will be preserved in its full vector glory. What makes this even better is that you as a developer don’t have to worry about any of this, you just send your data off to one of the many methods provided and the rest is done for you. There are of course some instances where you can’t print raw vector data out and need to handled rasterised data. This too is very simple and there are a few tricks you can use to make it even easier.