Oct
07
On October 1st I was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Silverlight. I am very honored and excited about this. The MVP program, taken from Tim Heuer’s post, “ is a recognition program that is in place to recognize and reward those individuals who have been identified by individuals (peers, Microsoft staff, etc.) as experts in their technology field and global contributors to the technology”
The other talented group of guys in this round of Silverlight MVP’s are (for the complete list of Silverlight MVP’s follow this link):
Talking about and working with Silverlight has been a dream come true. It enables me to pursue my passion of creating experiences and not applications (more to come on that).
There have been many people who have helped me in the MVP process; namely Glen Gordon, Jesse Liberty, Tim Heuer, John Papa, and Justin Angel. Thank you, and I look forward to the upcoming year.
Nov
18
Before I begin, obfuscate is one of my least favorite words. It just sounds pretentious whenever it rolls off the tongue. Moving on…over the past couple days I have been struggling with embedding a font into my Silverlight project. There are a number of tutorials out there on how to embed fonts (Tim Hauer has a great screencast on it). However thorough and easy to follow the tutorials are, embedding a font is still buggy, especially when working on a large scale project. There are two things wrong:
- The <FontFamily> tag is not recognized as valid by Visual Studio. The prime location to define an application wide font is in the App.xaml file. In this file, you can data bind the FontFamily anywhere in your application. Ignore the Visual Studio error and still place the <FontFamily> declaration in the App.xaml.
- The Font location is relative to where the first call is made from. If you have a control nested in a subdirecty that calls the font family, you will need to tweak the location in the App.xaml. This was a great find by my colleagues Stephen Rettinger and Lisa Smith.
As for obfuscating (saying it like Robin Leech) the font…why would you do this?
First, if you obfuscate the font, then the license like that of Adobe Acrobat. It’s considered truly embedded. If you include the ttf file in the xap it’s considered redistribution and the cost of a license is sky high. (Note: I am not a lawyer, this is strictly my understanding of font licensing).
Secondly you don’t have to worry about someone extracting the font file from the xap and installing it on their computer. Obfuscated fonts are not installable and can possibly be a subset of the original font.
Many thanks go out to Stephen Rettinger for showing me this. He has a really nice step by step on how to do this. Hopefully he gets a blog up to post the tutorial.
Links on how to embed fonts
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/03/10/embedding-fonts-in-silverlight-2.aspx
http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2008/11/tutorial-9-embedding-fonts-in.aspx
