by abenedik
31. March 2008 00:30
A while ago I spoke with Matevz Gacnik (his great blog: www.request-response.com/blog). He just came from MIX08 and told me that Silverlight is hot. Very hot! "You should implement support for it as soon as possible!" he said.
He is Microsoft's MVP. That means his advice should be taken seriously. So I postponed my current work - preparing a commercial version of Reader3ds.
Now I am proud to announce that new version of Paste2Xaml and ViewerSvg support Silverlight.
The following screenshots shows the new ViewerSvg with opened svg file and Export dialog:
Now it is possible to use almost any 2D or 3D drawing application to create user interface elements for Silverlight applications. You can draw it in Adobe® Illustrator®, CorelDRAW®, Inkscape, Microsoft Visio or other vector drawing application, save the work in svg file and use ViewerSvg to convert the drawing into xaml. If the application support save into Windows metafile (wmf or emf) like Autocad, it is possible to use Paste2Xaml to convert the saved metafile into xaml. If it is not possible to save the drawing into svg or metafile you can use copy and paste the drawing into Paste2Xaml. This can be used for example for converting graphs from Excel or WordArt from Microsoft Work into xaml. Also there are already huge internet image libraries that can be a great source for user interface elements (see Links section).
So you can use your favorite drawing application and simply draw the user interface of your WPF or Silverlight application in it.
There are also some other improvements and bug fixes:
New in Paste2Xaml library v1.3:
- Added support for silverlight.
- Added objects tree view with rename option - possible to export elements with name (so they can be manipulated later from the code).
- Added select object with mouse.
New in ViewerSvg library v1.3:
- Added support for silverlight.
- Added object selection with mouse.
- Added export dialog with xaml text and preview tabs.
- Added selecting number of decimals in the exported xaml (useful for optimizing the size of exported xaml).
- Added possibility to export only selected elements.
New in ReaderSvg library v1.6:
- Fixed reading number in exponent format (for example 1.234e-3) in transform element. This fixed the problems when some elements in the read image were placed on the wrong location and with the wrong size.
New in ReaderWmf library v1.3:
- Fixed problems with some wmf files that were imported with some anomalies (lost details)
New version of all the Ab2d tools and libraries is available from www.ab4d.com/Overview2d.aspx.