While exploring the web for XAML tools and utilities, I came across this nice ‘PowerPoint to Silverlight Exporter’ utility.This nice little tool can be downloaded  here : http://www.codeplex.com/pptx2silverlight. When I ran it , I was surprised by its simple user interface. I quickly created a sample PowerPoint presentation for testing. In my presentation, I added slides containing:

• Screenshot of my website.
• Different fonts.
• Clipart

My presentation looked something like this:

Sample presentation created using PowerPoint.

Then, in the ‘PowerPoint to Silverlight Exporter’ , I uploaded this presentation file and clicked on the link to convert. I was surprised to see an IE window open, containing my presentation hosted inside Silverlight Plugin.

PowerPoint to Silverlight Converter UI.

The utility seems to have a small builtin webserver for running the Silverlight application it generates. The Silverlight application exported by it, contained thumbnail view, navigation buttons and  a fullscreen button.

The exported Silverlight application.

I was curious to find the physical location of the output on my disk, so checked the configuration file of the utility located in ‘C:\Program Files\HCL\PPTConverter’.  It showed me this:

<add key=”BaseAddress” value=”C:\PPT2SilverlightData” />

Exploring this location, I found the files generated after exporting test.ppt where stored in  ‘C:\PPT2SilverlightData\CustomWebServer\MyWebServerRoot\Test.ppt’ folder.

Though this utility is interesting, it seems to be converting individual slides to images. It does not actually convert elements of the presentation to XAML objects.  I think this would be too much to ask for. But if it ever happens, I can use PowerPoint to create cool Silverlight applications

April 18th, 2009 | Tags: Silverlight, XAML | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Yesterday I received a complimentary copy of Fusion Charts Developer edition for blogging about Fusion Charts Free. You can read my new article on creating self-updating animated charts using Fusion Charts Free and ASP.NET. Felt so good, can’t remember when something like this happened for the last time.

Thank you Fusion Charts !

April 2nd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Say, you want to center align an image, inside a <DIV>. Looks like a small thing,doesn’t it ? I recently faced this problem, so I googled for a solution. This turns out to be a classic problem of web page designing. The most convenient way I discovered to solve this was to use TABLE inside the DIV.

<table>
<tr>
<td style=”width:25px;height:25px” valign=”middle” align=”center”>
<img src=”myimage” />
</td>
<tr>
</table>

It looks like center alignment is only supported for TDs in most browsers. I found a couple of solutions on the Internet, but I thought they were too lengthy and complicated for simple task like mine.

March 29th, 2009 | Tags: HTML | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the following code to resize an image with javascript:

imgnode.style.width= parseInt(imgnode.style.width) + 20;
imgnode.style.height = parseInt(imgnode.style.width) + 20;

This works perfect in IE. But does not work at all in FireFox. Then I changed it to:

var width = parseInt(imgnode.style.width);
var height = parseInt(imgnode.style.height);
width = width – 20;
height = height – 20;
imgnode.style.width= width + “px”;
imgnode.style.height = height + “px”;

This works great in FireFox and IE.

March 29th, 2009 | Tags: Javascript | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off