[jdsully]

The simple answer is use D2D/Dwrite for low level render code in new projects. If you use C# there’s probably higher level wrappers over these. Some of the older C# APIs wrap GDI+ which is pretty slow and renders text really poorly so go with whatever new stuff they have now.

I don’t know of any specific blogs/resources. I used to work on Excel’s render code so had a bit of an inside view.

[dman]

I worked on some inhouse tools similar to Excel (rendering highly customizable grids) so efficient 2D rendering is of high interest to me. This is from C++.