What this means to a Flash person is essentially there is no such thing as symbols. If you for example create an arm, and want to use it mirrored on both sides of a person, you need to define all the vector points and colors for two arms. Ouch. This means *massive* bloat for animation. The 'stevie' file I keep using for testing goes from a 152k swf file to a 1268k xaml file using resources (which to be fair is only 183k zipped, not sure if that is supported as it was in svg). Without resources that would be something like a 10X increase, depending on your symbol reuse.

Xaml does support resources. WPF also did, so I guess it just didn't make it into the beta2 version of Silverlight. Hopefully that is the problem anyway, because without resources it is pretty much zero value for web distribution.

Btw, the swf>xaml animation converter is basically done (including sound and bitmaps now). Here is the Stevie file in xaml - due to the resources thing *Edit you have to dnld and play in IE actually you can just click the link and open with IE, seems it plays the Xaml directly*. Or just play in Vista if you have it I assume. I guess I'll make an option not to use resources before putting it up for download.

A few people have sent files to convert (thanks!) -- again if you want to try converting a flash animation just send it my way and I'd be happy to send the conversion back. Actionscript isn't supported at this time, so it should be just 'pure' animation.