-When using Glide is there anyway to reduce the padding around the text in a TextBlock? I am trying to get some numeric field stacked as close to each other as possible. It seems there is quite a bit of padding in the cell above and below the text.
-What effect is the Alpha setting supposed to have on a TextBlock? I don’t see any difference regardless of what I set it at.
For TextBlocks it doesn’t do anything but for buttons it allows you to colorise them. Set the tint colour and then set the Alpha to 255 to see the colour change.
This seems to be controlled by the underlying bitmap class. Quite frustrating is the wrapping applied to text. When you try to draw text that is larger than the textblock size, it clips it on the word instead of trying to draw even part of it. You need to watch out for this as the fonts in the Glide Studio do not match the ones in Glide itself. Shame we could not get the source for this as I would have liked to work on that part. 
no, Glide Studio source.