.NET with BI development tips, tricks and experiences.

Before I go on a rant I would like to point out what a joy PowerPivot is. I found it a marvellous feature of upcoming Microsoft products and the implications for the Business Intelligence community are huge. I had been using it consistently for a couple of months in my spare time, exploring its potential for my present employer after seeing it at the SQLBits V conference back in November. I had nothing but praise.

This morning I got back from my Easter break ready to do a demo to the company only to be greeted with an expiry message. This would not have annoyed me so much if:

1. I had been informed PowerPivot will expire during the original installation.
2. A warning was given that an expiry was looming.
3. PowerPivot was not free.
4. A replacement download or installation was available to keep it rolling.

On the MSDN forums the only solution appears to be disable the Windows Time service and then set your clock back before April 1^st. This can cause issues in other applications though, so not viable if you are trying to perform a smooth demonstration.

Microsoft please remember to take your crazy pills. Seems a little insane to expire a FREE product, particuarly before the official release is available.

In this post I outline how I got a custom font to work in Silverlight after having some issues with compatibility.

While the winter here in the UK seems to have no end in sight this year I have been trying some new things out with Silverlight 3. I got quite bored of using the standard fonts and decided to start looking around for some slick fonts to use in my projects. Using the awesome Identifont I came across AUdimat by Jack Usine.

To get your font into your Silverlight project all you have to do is add the file and make sure the project has marked it as a resource. Then, to apply the font in your page just set the FontFamily attribute like so: FontFamily="filename#fontname". In my case this was: FontFamily="AUdimat-Regular.otf#AUdimat". Too easy? You bet ya.

Ran my project and got a load of garbage output from my test TextBlock “This is some text”. Doing some digging I started to discover the world of fonts and Silverlight is not one of rainbows and fluffy bunnies. This article from Silverlight Spy is the most comprehensive at outlining font support with Silverlight and provides a brief history of fonts.

The outline format of the AUdimat font was causing the problem so I had two options; find another font, convert it to a compatible format. Given the fact I had spent a while searching for the exact font I wanted I went with the second option. To accomplish this I was lucky to find the FREE Online Font Converter. Now I had my font in TrueType format I added it back to my project, changed my FontFamily attributes to FontFamily="AUdimat-Regular.ttf#AUdimat" et voila. A beautiful rare font in my Silverlight app. A big thank you to those sites I made use of.