Silverlight 1.0, Linux, Converters, and Swift 3D

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Somebody stop me! I'm posting at the frenetic rate of one entry per month, and this relentless onslaught of information has to seem like you're drinking from a fire hose! Call me prolific, if you'd like. Seriously...I won't mind. :-)

Okay...the big news of the day is that we released Silverlight 1.0 and Expression Encoder 1.0! Perhaps the best place to learn about the details is in Scott Guthrie's post. At the same time, we announced a partnership with Novell that will provide a Linux implementation of Silverlight called "Moonlight" that will run on all Linux distributions. Read Miguel de Icaza's post for the scoop. Cool stuff!

Also, Andrej Benedik (one of our WPF Conversion Tool contest winners) has released a couple of new tools and libraries to help read data from some of the most commonly used file formats (SVG, EMF, WMF, 3DS) and convert them to XAML. I love seeing the libraries, because that means you can easily build your own applications that consume these formats at runtime. Find the new tools on his WPF-Graphics site along with some samples.

Thanks to Thomas Goddard (of Maya to XAML fame) for giving me the heads-up about Electric Rain's Swift 3D v5 Silverlight integration. If you're not familiar with Swift 3D, it's a true 3D modeling and animation system that outputs individual frames to be played back in Flash files. Or put another way, imagine if a 3D modeling tool like 3ds Max or Maya "rendered" to 2D shapes that were shaded and colored to look like real 3D objects. Pretty innovative, if you ask me. Anyway, the recently released version 5 of Swift 3D now accomplishes this task for Silverlight. This means that you can create an animated 3D scene, export to XAML, then play it back in the browser or bring it into Expression Blend for further tweaking. Suh-weeeeeeeet!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2007
    Thanks for the great props, Mike!

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2007
    Hi Mike, I have seen few articles about Swift 3D and was truly fascinated. I will surely explore further about it after reading this nice article. Cheers!