Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 16 ■ PROGRAMMING SILVERLIGHT WITH XAML AND JAVASCRIPT 393
• Arial
• Arial Black
• Comic Sans MS
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Lucida Grande/Lucida Sans Unicode
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
Additionally, you can download a font using the Downloader control, and then use
the SetFontSource method of the TextBlock to assign the font to the text used in the
TextBlock.
You can control how the text is rendered using the FontSize, FontStyle, and
FontWeight properties. In the case of the latter, the possible values are Thin, ExtraLight,
Light, Normal, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, Black, and ExtraBlack.
You can add decorations to the TextBlock using the TextDecorations property. At present,
it just supports Underline and None as values.
You can wrap text using the TextWrapping property. This can contain the values NoWrap
(the text is clipped by the width of the TextBlock) or Wrap, where the text flows onto a new
line when it goes beyond the available width. Note that when text wraps like this, the
width of the text box may be reported inaccurately. Make sure that if you need to read the
width, you check on the actualWidth and actualHeight properties for a correct read.
Here’s an example of a TextBlock that uses TextWrapping and the Courier New font
family:
Transformations
XAML allows you to define a transformation that affects how the element will be rendered
on the screen. In computer graphics, items are managed using a mathematical construct
called a matrix. Through use of matrix-based mathematics, coordinates can be easily
manipulated, and thus transformations of objects are achievable. Silverlight gives you the
facility to define your own matrices, which can be used to define the transformation for