Dec 16 2013

Blend and the Global User Interface font mystery

.NET, Blend, Technical stuff, UX, Work
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If you are using the latest version of Blend (for Visual Studio 2013) and XAML, you may have noticed something weird: Suddenly, in some places of your XAML markup, an unwanted FontFamily property appears: FontFamily=”Global User Interface”

This is unfortunately caused by a bug in Blend. In my experience, it is not quite clear what exactly is causing the issue, but the fact is that suddenly for no reason, your FontFamily gets overwritten.

In most cases, it is fairly easy to solve: Just delete the faulty FontFamily attribute and all is well. I never noticed that it was actually overwriting an existing FontFamily attribute, instead it just adds the Global User Interface font family to elements which don’t have thiis attribute defined yet.

Be careful though, and double check before deleting this attribute!

Happy coding
Laurent

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Responses to “Blend and the Global User Interface font mystery”

  1. Ben Says:
    May 14th, 2014 at 23:47

    Hey Laurent, did you ever bottom this out / have it stop – its driving me MAD ! And this is post is only thing that comes up when I google. I have it happening in VS 2013 and seemingly when I click out of editing an xml element in xaml, or whe ni e.g. f12 to jump to a style specifie3d in Style=”{StaticResource blah}”. Seems we both have the same VS poltergeist haunting our xaml?

  2. Ben Says:
    May 14th, 2014 at 23:48

    Sorry should have mentioned, seems its something to do with this font being the default Fallback Font. Its as if VS thinks I don’t have Segoe UI installed or something (the relevant styles use this. Its driving me crazy as I am editing thousands of lines of xaml !

  3. lbugnion Says:
    May 15th, 2014 at 08:50

    IIRC this was acknowledged as a bug by the blend team, but I will ask them if they have a follow up.

    Cheers
    Laurent

  4. Numberobis Says:
    June 3rd, 2014 at 12:13

    I noticed this bug in Visual Studio 2013 designer.

  5. Cathy Says:
    December 15th, 2014 at 04:32

    This bug is also driving me crazy. I am trying to let the user choose what font he wants and do a binding, and VS will ERASE my binding and replace it with the Global User Interface font.

    I need a fix for this — a global find/replace won’t work in this instance for me because some elements are Segoe UI and some are using a binding for a user selected font family.

    Any updates on the status of getting this fixed? I need another editor for XAML.

  6. Lukasz-C Says:
    August 17th, 2015 at 01:04

    The same problem exists in Visual Studio 2015. And, unfortunately, it does replace the FontFamily attribute if one already exists.

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