As you probably know the power of WPF and its subset Silverlight is its ability to render images using vector graphics. I am not a graphic designer myself, I can usually get a decent design together but it’s usually more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

As all images in vector graphics are expressed using mathematics they provide computers with some superior processing capabilities that are not possible with common binary formats. We can transform them, scale them, animate them to name just a few . However, with the advantages of having an image represented in mathematics, we also suffer with increased complexity when trying to create them from scratch.

With the current release of Silverlight, we have the power in the framework to represent near photo realistic images purely in vectors. Take for example the photo of me  shown below, this image, running in Silverlight, has been built using only vectors. You can see this running in Silverlight here.

Bad Mood

If we take a closer look at the structure of the eye, we can see that the complexity of the XAML path objects, which are the basic building blocks used to compose the image, are far beyond the capabilities of any human designer using tools such as Blend or Visual Studio.

The image was actually constructed using the cool site  vectormagic.com. On this site you can upload any photo and it will convert the image to vectors. This covered off the majority of the grunt work of converting the image into vectors.  VectorMagic offer you two free downloads in a range of formats.... but no XAML option. Therefore, I downloaded the file in Adobe Illustrator format, from there it was a simple process of exporting the image into XAML using Mike Swanson’s awesome AI-XAML converter.

Hope this quick example has helped illustrate the power of Silverlight’s graphical capabilities and gets you thinking about what other assets you could convert into XAML.