Contents tagged with WPF - Silverlight
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Jon's News Wrapup - June 25, 2008 Edition
Here's the grab bag of tools, development toolkits, etc.
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Inkscape to support XAML export
Today, Adam Kinney gave me the tip off to some cool news: Inkscape is adding XAML export.
Great, what's Inkscape? Glad you asked! Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, like Adobe Illustrator. Rather than drawing in pixels (like you'd do in Photoshop, Paint.NET, etc.), you're drawing in vectors. Inkscape is a little unique in that it uses SVG (scalable vector graphics) as its base format. SVG is a W3C standard, with pretty good support in most non-IE browsers (check out SVG Tetris in Firefox 1.5 or higher). It's unfortunate that IE doesn't (and likely never will) support SVG, since browser support for standards based vector-based graphics and text could do so much for the web.
Although the drawing primitives in XAML are very similar to SVG, up until now there hasn't been a really solid way of developing assets in SVG and moving them to XAML.
Right now, there are only two real ways to do any serious design in XAML:
- Buy Expression Blend and Expression Design ($599)
- Buy Adobe Illustrator ($599) and use the XAML export plugin
Now that Inkscape is picking up XAML export, there's a third way that doesn't start with any buying.
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Silverlight doesn't require any JavaScript
It's easier to understand Silverlight when you understand that, at its heart, it's a simple browser plug-in. JavaScript is extremely useful for browser detection, and it's the only way to interact with Silverlight 1.0, but JavaScript not at all required to display a Silverlight control with XAML content.