For the past few years, I’ve received an almost-weekly e-mail about my old Adobe Illustrator to XAML export plug-in. It usually begins with something like: “I just upgraded to Illustrator version (later than CS4), and I can’t get your plug-in to work.” My reply is always along the lines of: “Sorry, but the Illustrator SDK has changed, and I no longer work with XAML. Plus, I’m unable to release the source code, so my hands are tied.”
Many users have switched to using Blend for Visual Studio, because you can import .ai files directly. However, I often hear that users prefer the “clean output” of the plug-in. Others have resorted to running old versions of Illustrator inside a VM. That seems like a lot of work to continue running a plug-in, but it tells me that the plug-in is an integral part of some workflows.
I’ve tried to quickly port the code to newer versions of the Illustrator SDK more than a few times. Each time, I’ve walked away disappointed with my progress. It always seemed that it would require a lot of work to properly bring the code foward. Ideally, a newer version of the plug-in would adopt the architecture that I used in Ai->Canvas.
Finally, about a week ago, I was contemplating a Kickstarter-style project that would help me justify the time it would take to convert everything to the latest SDK. I feel guilty that my users have been left out in the cold, so I dove-in to the code one more time to estimate the effort it would take. Then it occurred to me that I might be able to make a “frankenbuild” of the old code with the plug-in model of the new Ai->Canvas code.
An afternoon-or-so of work later, I had an updated Ai->XAML plug-in building against the Illustrator CC 2014.1 SDK in Visual Studio. Later that evening, I had it working in Xcode. Best of all, the plug-in successfully exported all of the test files I’ve built-up over the years. I shared the plug-in with some users who have since confirmed that it works with Adobe Illustrator CC 2014.1 on both Mac and PC.
The only “feature” that this build adds is that it works with the latest version of Illustrator. Otherwise, it should behave exactly as it has in the past.
You can download version 0.2 of the plug-in on the Ai->XAML project page.
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