I’m having far too much fun converting things from Illustrator to XAML.

This opens up a whole new set of avenues for me to explore. As powerful as Blend and Design are, Illustrator has just plainly been around far longer and has more functionality at this point in time to do certain things.

The exporter exports to silverlight or wpf compatibility, btw.

For text, it “technically” isn’t supported, however, if you convert your text to points, you then can export the points with each character being its own individual path of nodes being as editable in Blend as XAML as they could be done in Illustrator.

The real power of this is when you have something realy crazy that you have done with various warp and masking tools – exporting to XAML = drools.

This is going to be fun.

I’ve mentioned a few times in the past that I’ve created a silverlight page for FacingBlend… actually almost a year ago. It needs to be upgraded as it was originally done when Silverlight was at 1.1, but that initial project is one of a few things that I have plans for.

Here’s a bit of a teaser in 2 words: Toy box

Just… incredible.

I decided that I was going to go back to working on something that I’d started before the book – while my other computer was waiting for its completed status to be… well – complete.

In the process, I found myself frustrated with trying to creatively recreate something that I’d originally created in Blend. (Perhaps I should have tried in Design?) On a whim, I decided that it might be interesting to see if someone had created a plugin which converted Photoshop files to XAML.

Well guess what? Someone has.

Here’s a link.

This makes me a very VERY happy lady.

Update

Its not path by path like I would prefer it – instead what it does is turn the file into a PNG and from there create an imagebrush.

Alternatively, if you have a PSD you could just take the elements which you would like, seperate the layers, and then save each as a PNG. Add the new PNG to your project in the resources pane, and then draw out a shape and fill it with an imagebrush.

– – – Not exactly what I was looking for, but useful.

Further searching shows several Adobe Illustrator exports to XAML though which ARE path plotting.

Here are a few links:
http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
http://www.codeplex.com/xamlxporter

A lot of the times, if you have your PSD prepared for it, you can easily open your items to illustrator.  Technically you can do this on any occasion, however, depending on how you have your PSD, it may be quite difficult to tinker with once its opened into illustrator.  The behavior of the different elements often don’t quite behave the way they would if they were built natively within Illustrator.

The installation of Vista at first appeared to be pretty smooth, but then I attempted to update the drivers on my video card so it would pick up the dual DVI on the single card and display across both monitors.

Unfortunately, I encountered the blue screen of death and the only way it was even possible to get the dang thing to load into vista was by going into safe mode and rolling back the drivers. Downloaded several different releases of the driver for the video card and unfortunately all of them resulted in the same issue.

Lets just say, I was fairly bummed when I wanted to get through the first few chapters of the Silverlight 1 animations book published by Friends of ED.

In any event, this resulted in finally purchasing the last pieces to a computer which has been slowly coming into conception, piece by piece over the past few weeks. It was a little costly and untimely, but we upgraded none-the-less. Vista’s installation was painless and the windows updates have been applied. I just wish it hadn’t eaten up my entire weekend.

Cross your fingers for me, if you could, and hope that things go smoothly from this point forward.

Reformat and Vista complete installation – check. Drivers for LAN to connect to the net? Incompatible. Installing wireless for now…

The last few days I’ve been tinkering with a few of the tutorials over the web and its been interesting, but I found myself really missing having the string of projects one after another.

I plan to take the screensaver which I created and make it something more, but that will come with time. I have a really awesome idea for it but I don’t want to give too many details at this point in time. Quite possible that things will change while I work on it.

What I started to realize was that I was a bit hooked on going through the book and doing the hands-on projects, and I wanted more, so I started looking around. I read reviews regarding books on blend and they just weren’t exactly on par with what I was looking for, and neither were the ones on C# – at least not at this stage.

But then I found a book which seems almost a natural progression from the one which I just completed. Interestingly enough, its by the same publishing company.

The Book: Foundation Silverlight 2 Animation, by Jeff Paries.

The reviews are very similar to what I felt regarding the Blend 2 book – author doesn’t assume you already have high levels of knowledge, and progressively directs you through topics as they get more complex.

So once I reformat my computer and install vista (decided to upgrade from windows XP), I’ll start going through this new book and I’ll be sure to blog my brains out about it chapter after chapter.

After blogging about this book over the past two weeks, I feel that it would only make sense to give a final review of my overall feeling regarding the book, Foundation Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight, by Victor Gaudioso.

The book starts the reader off without any assumptions regarding the reader’s past experience. If a person is interested in going through the book, that person will likely already have the qualifications to understand its contents. As long as the person going through the book is able to take direction coupled with the ability to be self motivated, I think that many people will find this book to be an easy read – which is saying a lot for a book which sits among others which are often dry and difficult to get through due to their nature as being technical oriented.

The progression of the book from chapter to chapter is well paced, starting easy with a bang to draw the reader in, and later becoming challenging, but not impossible to accomplish. Just as the reader passes the middle of the book, the difficulty raises ever-so slightly, but not too far where the reader is thrown off.

The very last chapters are well placed as they are essentially review over the entire contents of the book. These chapters concrete the reader’s newly acquired abilities while adding a touch of more difficulty to keeps the reader moving forward because they continue to learn more even to the end.

Finally, once one has gotten through the book, I’m left with the feeling that these 15 chapters are only the tip of the iceberg, that I can either obtain further knowledge through other books, or chart out on my own. The author on several occasions lists his email address for the readers to contact him, and I’ve discovered that unlike other authors, he actually does respond and is interested in what the reader is accomplishing, instead of having an assistant or someone else pat the reader on the head.

The only criticism that I truly have for the contents of the book is on the level of the User Experience. Throughout the book the author steps the readers through the creation of a multitude of custom controls, buttons and the like, but never steps the reader through a complete button as most users are comfortable with seeing, where the button or control interacts when hovering or clicking upon a button. That being said, there are several occasions where the author leads the reader through areas where the reader can locate and discover how to do such a task on their own. The book reads as a very complete well rounded book, save for that one lack, and for that, I find myself feeling that the inconsistency is uncharacteristic when compared to the solidarity which the rest of the writing presents.

Regardless, I much enjoyed reading the book. The author’s personality shined through the book from cover to cover and gave the sense that he was talking to the reader, as opposed to at the reader.

Information regarding this book and its contents can be found at WindowsPresentationFoundation.com.

Ariel Leroux
FacingBlend.com