Cool heat map of traffic accidents across the US built on Bing with VisualFusion and Silverlight.

Coo demo of a 3d display with multitouch and off-screen gestural control.

We transform an LCD into a display that supports both 2D multi-touch and unencumbered 3D gestures. Our BiDirectional (BiDi) screen, capable of both image capture and display, is inspired by emerging LCDs that use embedded optical sensors to detect multiple points of contact. We exploit the spatial light modulation capability of LCDs to allow lensless imaging without interfering with display functionality.

Lately there’s been quite a bit of buzz about SilverX, an application that claims to convert Flash files to Silverlight. The SilverX website does a good job of outlining the features and benefits of the application but there was little information on how it handles Actionscript.

Is this the Holy Grail for Flash developers looking to use the Adobe IDE to build Silverlight applications? We decided to put it through the paces to see what it’s all about.

Install
Installing SilverX is straightforward and it provides an uninstaller in the application folder if you decide to remove it. One thing I didn’t expect was that it inserted a splash page to Expression Blend. A nice touch, and useful as I wouldn’t have immediately known that it added items to my ‘File’ menu.

Converting a Flash file to Silverlight
For the first test I decided to load a fairly complicated Flash application that I had built as a prototype for a touch screen picture frame. The reason I chose this file was because it had no externally loaded assets, it was built as one fat .SWF with embedded images.

The Flash to Silverlight conversion process only took a few seconds

Oops, a warning that Actionscript was not supported. Not surprising.

Having a look at the output, it created a folder with 3 areas that were very well organized.

• Preview containing the original .swf, the .xap Silverlight app and supporting HTML/JS
• Resources containing all the placed assets in the .swf
• Solution containing the .sln and Silverlight project files

Running the application
Upon launching the application I found that none of the Actionscript was implemented, but all of the artwork came over nicely. Below is a preview of both the original .SWF and the .XAP outputs.

Note that this is a large file (2.7mb) with no preloader as it was originally indented to be run locally.

Original Flash version | Flash converted to Silverlight with SilverX

Another test
I knew that converting such a complicated app was a lot to ask, so I ran another test with something much more basic. This is a timeline based animation of a crane unfolding that I had used for the 1000CranesOfHope.com website.

As you can see from the examples the conversion of the animation was flawless. The only thing it missed was some Actionscript that sets the visibility of my guide asset to false and a stop action at the end of the timeline.

Original Flash version | Flash converted to Silverlight with SilverX

Conclusion
Considering that I was running version 1.2 of the application I’d say it’s very solid. Is it the Holy Grail for flash developers who are looking to build Silverlight applications with the Adobe IDE? No. But SilverX never said it was. Maybe in future releases we’ll see support for Actionscript conversion, but I imagine that is a huge undertaking and in the end may not be all that useful.

The strength of SilverX is in its ability to quickly and cleanly extract assets, vector graphics and timeline based animations from .swf files. If you’re a Flash developer that needs a jump start on a Flash to Silverlight project SilverX is a must have in your application toolbox.

Bing released an iPhone app today (App store link). It’s pretty sweet. Check it out and write a review before the haters flood the ratings like they did with Seadragon Mobile.

Joel Neubeck has posted an article on capturing the Webcam in Silverlight 4. The article includes source code and covers JPG storage to the local file system via FJCore.

Starting today you can access Bing Maps via a new Silverlight interface by visiting this Bing Maps Beta URL

In addition to all of the standard Bing Map features the Silverlight interface seamlessly blends between map, satellite, and birds eye views. It also offers context sensitive links to Photosynths, online photo galleries and points of interest.

Eye on Earth is a joint venture between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) to make environmental information more accessible to European citizens. The application uses Windows Azure to gather information from 6,000 air quality monitoring stations and plot them to a Bing Map with a Sliverlight front end.

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot is amazing. Anyone have an invite? I’m really looking forward tto when they open this up and 3rd party developers can create collections.

Edit: I received an invite about an hour after I filled out the invite form.

Microsoft announced that Windows Embedded CE, now has Silverlight included. Full article @ arstechnica.com

The CodenameWindows blog has reposted a couple of recent job descriptions that give some hints about a rich client app based on Seadragon called Seahorse.

Your help can critically impact one of the most revolutionary new products being built at the company: Seahorse. We are a v1 product group within Live Labs – the people that brought you Seadragon and Photosynth . We typically don’t share much about the Seahorse vision; but we can share the following. As a sister team to Seadragon, the Seahorse vision involves building a new rich client application with deep ties to the web, web-services, Seadragon visualizations, and your client-side documents. We are – in a very real sense – hoping to redefine the way that people think about organizing, visualizing, saving, sharing and consuming large amounts of rich visual data. Succinctly, we hope to change the way people think about the internet.

Based on this blog post from 12/2007 it would appear that Seahorse has been brewing at live labs for a while.