Monday, November 24, 2008

Is it really that simple

Working in the Apps dev space, you quiet often get issued with bugs and feature requests that users expect to be very easy to fix. As a general rule of thumb, I attempt to fix anything the user wants as long as it fits within the scope/budget for the project. As with everything though, quiet often a bug/request will be issued that is actually a lot bigger and more complicated than it initially appears.. And this brings me to something I've been sitting on, thinking about for a few weeks..

Over on CodingHorror is a post about a "bug/feature request" that seems to have been made into a big issue. It's a request to have the Windows Forms designer automatically default the forms font to Segoe... On the surface of this, its a pretty simple request...

The problem for me is that i use VS2008 and target Win XP AND Vista.. Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that Segoe is actually present on the target machine, and I'm not too sure if I'm actually allowed to distribute the font (I'm guessing I can't..).. This raises an interesting problem.. Windows Forms doesn't deal very well with automatic resizing. It can be done, but requires a lot of extra work, and because of this, I don't want to use Sagoe and risk the target machine picking the next best font..


Sure, there are options available, like having project settings determine the font.. i.e. a "Vista Only" option, but personally I think that allowing the users to just select the font they want works best..

Anyways, back to the grind...