ClearType on a memory DC

I recently developed a small information browser application for Windows CE 5.0 devices. This small application uses a touch list as an item selector and displays an in-memory bitmap with textual information related to the selected item.

The touch list uses a ClearType-rendered font (see the latest Touch List sample) painted to a memory DC. I also used a ClearType font to paint the text on the memory bitmap containing the detailed information about the main list item. Unfortunately the font was not being rendered in ClearType mode. Why was this? Maybe a Windows CE issue?

After quickly recompiling the code to target a Windows Mobile 6.0 device, I got exactly the same result. So I turned to the rendering code looking for a bug, but found none. Instead I found an interesting difference between the touch list rendering and the bitmap rendering.

If you look at the touch list samples, you will see that the memory DC is created from a CPaintDC. On the bitmap rendering code, I was using a memory DC created from a CClientDC (got the same result by using NULL as the HDC value).

So apparently you can only render ClearType fonts to a memory DC when this is created as compatible with the DC you get on BeginPaint... Has anyone else experienced this?

Windows Mobile API Usage Tool

Microsoft has just released a new tool to determine the Windowm Mobile API usage in your application. This is especially useful for deprecated functions! Go take a look here.