Beautiful Silverlight Watch

Check this amazing piece of work, created by Michael S. Scherotter (Beauty with Silverlight) in Silverlight 1.0 - The Trainmaster Cannonball watch, a three-dial watch with working night/day, chronograph, and full-screen mode.

Michael worked in Expression Blend and a little JavaScript (It uses Silverlight 1), and came up with: http://xmldocs.net/ball 

 

 

Amazing !! Click on various controls and see how the watch works. The best part is the change to day/night effect, it looks superb. Various controls are shown here:

 

Its also available as Windows Live Gadget and is available at Windows Live Gallery. So this gadget can be put in your Windows Live Spaces or other blog , go here to get it. Thanks Michael !

In fact, you can embed it into any page  using the following html code:

<iframe width="250" height="250" src="http://xmldocs.net/ball" frameborder="0"  scrolling="no" >
    </iframe>

The Silverlight 1.0 application starts up quickly (231k of XAML compressed into a 59k zip file) and takes very little processor power to run.  This entire application shown in the vector graphics format of Silverlight, XAML, with no images. He has also provided the source code and explained how the second hand ticks in.

Please check Ticking in Silverlight Clock + Source Code and

Beauty with Silverlight for more details.

 

Really beautiful and amazing !

Convert SWF to XAML

If one wants to reuse his available Flash files with WPF or Microsoft Silverlight, there are tools that do the conversion. Check out these :

"Electric Rain® is bringing new life to Adobe® Flash files within the Microsoft® Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight platforms with the introduction of Harmony™, the first commercial application for Flash-to-XAML content conversions.
Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."

Harmony supports exporting to both WPF-based XAML as well as to Microsoft’s new Silverlight XAML mark-up,and serves as a single translation solution.This tool is yet to be available , one can signup for beta and it'll be a commercial software.

There's another tool SWF2XAML developed by Mike Swanson of Microsoft which is free.
The tool developed in Mike's spare time is a fully managed code application. The current version of the tool allows to directly open a SWF file and browse through its frames one by one. When a required frame is found,one can either export a XAML file or copy the XAML to the clipboard for easy pasting. The conversion isn't perfect, and there are many areas for improvement.For common cases, however, it should do the trick.
It requires .NET Framework 3.0.
If you're using Windows Vista, its already there.
You can download SWF2XAML here.

UPDATE: Check my new related postConvert SWF to XAML using TheConverted