To night I spent hours trying to convert from a SVG file to XAML. The reason for wanting to do the converting, is that I want a vector based image in a WPF application I’m currently developing. Using a vector based image will scale much better than using a bitmap image.

The solution

I first downloaded a vector based image from this url: http://iconeden.com/icon/free/get/milky-a-free-vector-iconset
Inside the zip file you will find a SVG file. You can open this file using Adobe Illustrator, but I prefer using free alternatives, so I downloaded Inkscape. Inkscape is a open source vector graphics editor. I opened the file, and it contained several images. I wanted one of them; a clock. I copied and pasted the image into a new instance of Inkscape. If you choose Save as from the file menu in Inkscape, you will notice that I gives you the option to save as XAML. I tried doing that without success. It turned out that the XAML produced by Inkscape is not valid when opening it in Expression Blend or Visual Studio. So I saved the file as Clock.svg

On Codeplex there’s a project called XamlTune. I downloaded it and used the command prompt tool called svg2xaml.exe found in the package. The output from this small application were a XAML file called Clock.xaml. I opened this file in Visual Studio and guess what? It worked. The image were converted from SVG to XAML without any errors.

If you need to convert from SVG to XAML, I recommend that you look at this tool. I have only used it a few time, but it looks good so fare.

Tags: wpf