Search results matching tags 'Tools' and 'WPF'

Converting a Vector PDF image to a XAML Drawing Brush

NathanZaugg — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 21:18:44 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a presentation by Scott Hanselman about scaling your life. One of the many great pieces of advice is to blog about something rather than email an answer.

So this afternoon my good friend Alex asked me how we used to convert Vector PDF images to XAML Drawing Brushes so they can be applied to objects as a background, for instance. The vector part of that sentence is important because any rasterized portions of the PDF will be excluded in this process.

Well, there really isn’t a lot to it, so here are the instructions:

Open up your vector image in Inkscape. Inkscape can open a wide variety of images, including PDF.
Click File –> Save As. Drop the Save as Type to “Microsoft XAML (*.xaml)” and save the file as XAML. Once the file is saved you can open it up in Internet Explorer to see how the conversion process went. The problem though, is that this is painting directly to a canvas and is not packaged to be used as a background.
Open up Microsoft Expression Blend. Create a new project. Open up the XAML for the main file and replace it with the contents from your file from step 2.
Select all parts of the drawing then select Tools –> Make Brush Resource –> Make Drawing Brush Resource. This will pop open a dialog that will give you some options about where to define this resource and what it should be named.

So now your technically done. The contents of the Resource Dictionary now contain your new Drawing Brush Resource. To test it out clear all content from your main window except for the Window and Grid objects. Click the whitespace and open the properties inspector. Click the square dialog button for the Background and select Local Resource and the name you gave your brush. You should now be able to see your image:

The reason it is stretched is because your drawing brush will stretch to fill it’s contents. If you have a look at the XAML of the main window shows you will see the following XAML:

<Grid Background="{DynamicResource MindfireBackground}">

That’s pretty much it!

Great WPF Editor

NathanZaugg — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:48:12 GMT

There is Expression Blend, Visual Studio, XamlPad that we are all aware of and use on a regular biases for creating our XAML. One that I am adding to the top of my XAML editor list is Kaxaml! This is the lightest weight most useful XAML editor I have ever seen! It's got a great WPF/Blend look and is light and fast. No more waiting 10-30 seconds for Visual Studio to fail to load your XAML documents! If there were a way to replace the Visual Studio editor with this I would totally do it!

Unlike Blend it has code insight. Unlike Visual Studio 2008 it is fast and functional! My favorite feature is the XAML Scrubber which will "pretty up" your XAML by organizing the tags and attributes. It will even put the most important attributes at the start of the tag. It removes much of the pressure of writing XAML!

Hopefully some future versions will include a visual tree and perhaps even a feature where you can click on an click on an object and be taken to the applicable part in the XAML. The XAML Scrubber only uses spaces and I am a tab guy -- oh how I wish it supported tabs! Also, I noticed that once I added an event to a control it said I had to compile the XAML -- not sure what that means. That means it's probably mostly useful for creating the user interface before you start hooking code into it.

If you need a good place to hammer out some design -- this may be your best bet!

Silverlight Presentation Files.zip

NathanZaugg — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:38:16 GMT

Includes the following projects:

ComputeDemp.zip - A CPU intensive Winform application to compate with Silverlight 2.0
ComputeDemoSilverlight.zip - A CPU intensive Silverlight application to compare with Winforms. (Pretty close speeds)

Silverlight2App.zip - A Silverlight 2.0 Client application that connects to a music service to query for songs.

Also includes a Media Player.

Search results matching tags 'Tools' and 'WPF'

Converting a Vector PDF image to a XAML Drawing Brush

Great WPF Editor

Links:

Silverlight Presentation Files.zip