Windows 7 - Paint.NET v3.5 Enhanced for Windows 7

The Paint.NET Team has announced the v3.5 of Paint.NET will use DirectWrite on Windows 7 for rendering text. DirectWrite is part of Windows 7’s text rendering enhancements. Very cool!



DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7. DirectWrite enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications. Applications can also use DirectWrite with GDI and carry forward existing investments in the Win32 code base. You can read more about DirectWrite here.

You can download an alpha build (build 3509) of Paint.NET v3.5 here. Please be warned that alpha builds are pre-beta quality and will likely have issues. But if you want to play around, give it a try.

Originally created as a Washington State University student project, Paint.NET has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program, which is included with Windows, into a powerful editor with support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins.

no its a private developer.

Paint.NET originated as a computer science senior design project during spring 2004 at Washington State University. Version 1.0 consisted of 36,000 lines of code and was written in fifteen weeks.[5] In contrast, version 3.35 has approximately 162,000 lines of code. The Paint.NET project continued over the summer and into the fall 2004 semester for both the version 1.1 and 2.0 releases.
Development continues with two developers who now work at Microsoft and worked on previous versions of Paint.NET while they were students at WSU. As of May 2006 the program had been downloaded at least 2 million times,[6] at a rate of about 180,000 per month.[