The Visual Studio Gallery is already home to 533 tools, controls and templates for VS 2010 and this number is sure to grow once VS 2010 hits RTM and people get to grips with the extendable new editor.

Don’t forget to check out The Visual Studio Blog for more tips, tricks and tools.

Taking my bitmap font Envy Code B into the vector TrueType Envy Code R was a long process, the most difficult being hinting.

Bitmap fonts are incredibly easy to make. Using a program like Softy or BitFonter you decide the size of your letters and start plotting pixels. You can see exactly how it will look because you draw every glyph (letter/symbol/number) in every size you want to support. This can obviously be very time consuming and doesn’t let you take full advantage of the resolution of the device and the capabilities it offers. A printer can handle in excess of 300 dpi while a display is typically 72 dpi (Mac) or 96 dpi (Windows) with LCD’s supporting sub-pixels due to the individual layout of the red-green and blue elements you can’t feasibly pre-plot every single combination and even if you could the file size would be rather large.

I don’t normally republish my Tweets but are my highlights.

damienguard:
Methods returning “this” is a hack for fluency. Let’s get “..” added to the C# compiler to operate on previous object. a.This()..That()

It’s been a struggle but finally after countless hours here it is, the next release of my Envy Code R monospaced (fixed-width) font designed for programmers.

Many glyphs have been redrawn since preview 6 including braces, lower-case yy, 66 & 99, ampersand, dollar-sign, hash etc. One pixel was removed vertically height to make the box drawing balanced and allow more lines per screen.

I am now settled into my new, albeit temporary, apartment here in Vancouver, BC working for Microsoft!

For those who haven’t been following my blog long I took a job at Microsoft Canada Development Center as a developer on LINQ to SQL. It turns out my H-1B Visa has been approved and I will be moving down to Redmond in October.

Work on my Envy Code R programming font has resumed and I’ve spent hours playing with the hinting process to ensure it looks good at sizes above and below 10 point:

I know, I said there would be a good chance that the next version of Envy Code R would be out this weekend but the annoying sizing, thickness and cropping issues that came up at some sizes above and below the optimum 10 point were really annoying me.

Many articles later, some playing around with Microsoft Visual TrueType and much frustration and experimentation later I think I’m on the right path.

The next version of my Envy Code R font especially designed for programming (monospaced, easily distinguishable characters) is nearing completion and represents a very response-driven update to feedback, specifically:

I have also fleshed out a number of additional symbols and accented letters that has seen the number of code pages supported increase to 12 pages and made a large number of tweaks to the italic version which was a last-minute addition to 0.6 (PR6) and had a number of errors especially round the accented letters.

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender known as the Droid family.

Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.

It has been a crazy couple of months between moving home, spending a week in Seattle and a couple of days in Holland for my real day job (the source of income!)

It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I’ve missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I’m surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel…

Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood published a nice round-up of coding fonts he’s been looking at lately in Visual Studio with his own color scheme.

For reasons best known to Jeff he went with 11 point this time (previously his scheme was published with 10 point) and used the older preview of Envy Code R neglecting to mention the italic-as-bold variant to get round the no-italics limitation of Visual Studio’s highlighting syntax editor.

A newer version of Envy Code R is available.

The last few days have been frantic ones putting the final touches to the next release of the Envy Code R typeface as I bring it closer to my idea of the perfect coding font.

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

I have been experimenting with Envy Code R over the last few months — everything from creating a bold version to delta hinting with Visual TrueType with mixed results.

If you’re tired of the ugly-as-sin Courier New and have tried the popular well-known scalable TrueType/OpenType mono-spaced/fixed-width replacements:

And you’re still not feeling it then why not give these potentials a quick spin.

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

Here is the Envy Code R programming font I’ve been working on as it currently stands:

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

I’ve been back less than 36 hours but have managed to spend a little more time working on Envy Code R.

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

My last post got me thinking — if I’m so happy with Envy Code B bar it’s ability to scale or take advantage of ClearType then there is only one real option. I reached for the pixelated TrueType conversion of Envy Code B and five hours later had a rough version of my first ever vector fontfirst ever vector font — Envy Code R.

The blogging about favorite programming fonts doesn’t seem to want to truly die down so here’s how I rate the most popular fonts for programming in descending order with my own Envy Code B which I use all the time — but now desperately needs the ClearType treatment.

If you click the image you’ll see red boxes highlighting what I feel are the various problem characters/positioning with each font.

It’s been a long time coming but finally — a TrueType conversion of my programming font Envy Code B.

It’s still a pixelated font so will only look good at 10pt (on Windows, 13pt on the Mac). There is no bold or italic variants but this should be enough to get it into those elusive TTF-only applications like CodeSmith and Flash.