I’ve had this idea for a long time, ever since I watched Channel 9 “An hour with the Avalon Team” video with Pablo Fernicola, Rob Relyea, and Arik Cohen.

Rob Relyea suggested that ideally it would be possible to directly “Save As XAML” from Paint. [video - 19:00]

So I took it upon myself to get it done. Given that it would be quite a challenge to get this done directly from a bitmap I decided to do it from an Illustrator® drawing. Using Mike Swanson on his Adobe® Illustrator® to Avalon/XAML Export I am able to read the Illustrator® drawing as a set of path and load it as XAML graph within the .NET framework.

Currently the only three elements directly supported are TextAreas, TextBoxs, and Buttons. internally however it also recognizes vertical and horizontal scroll bars.

You can visit SketchUI’s page and download the project, try it out, make your own drawing and see how it will convert it into XAML UIElements.

I will be writing a guide very soon to explain how to make Illustrator® drawing that are recognizable by SketchUI, I will also try to make it much more flexible.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think of it.

And if you think SketchUI is useless, well then think again. Imagine how it would be if a designer sketched his design on a tablet PC, just to watch it come to life a few moments later.