open source Silverlight design tool for Linux

Alan McGovern, the creator of MonoTorrent, has spent the past 12 weeks developing a visual design tool for XAML that runs on Mono. Although McGovern had no previous experience with either Silverlight or XAML when he started working on his XAML designer, he has successfully created an impressive working prototype.

McGovern's XAML tool—which he calls Lunar Eclipse—was designed to work with Moonlight, Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media application development framework. Novell's developers produced their Moonlight prototype during a 20 day hackathon in June, during which McGovern started working on Lunar Eclipse.

McGovern's current Lunar Eclipse prototype supports basic animation as well as creating, moving, resizing, and changing the properties of basic shapes. "The basics are there for recording animations. Not everything can be animated as of yet. The supporting infrastructure is all there. It's just currently it can only animate properties which take doubles as their value," writes McGovern in a blog entry. "You can do cool stuff like record several keyframes, then move them around to make the time longer, or shorter, or you can completely rearrange the keyframes so things happen in a different order. You can also seek along the storyboard and see the positions of the elements at different times in the animation."

Although the user interface of Lunar Eclipse is still extremely primitive, the underlying functionality is shaping up nicely. According to McGovern, the eventual goal is to make it possible for Lunar Eclipse to be integrated into MonoDevelop. There are also plans to make a XAML-based interface for Lunar Eclipse so that it can be used in a web browser.

According to lead Mono developer Miguel de Icaza, most of the components required for the open source Silverlight development stack are working, and will be part of Mono 1.2.6, which is scheduled for release in October or November.
Source :http://arstechnica.com