In my last post, I covered using WikiPedia as a clip art source for your Silverlight/WPF Apps.
Now, I'll show you how to use Microsoft Office Clip Art.
You can use the web site to browse through the collection or any Office Application.
Personally, I prefer PowerPoint for browsing through the clip art library.
In Power Point 2007, open up a new presentation and click on the Insert Tab and click on Clip Art.
In keeping with my Maryland theme, I choose the search term "Maryland."
When you mouse over each picture, a tooltip tells you which file format you're looking at.
For our purposes, we're interested in WMF or EMF formats as they are vector graphic formats.
You can narrow down the results to exclude photographs, movies, and sounds by removing those files types the "Results Should Be" drop down.
Remember, though, not all items marked "Clip Art" are vectors. Many are PNGs or GIFs.
Since fellow Marylanders Pete Brown and John Blumenauer both like trains, I'll pick the graphic with the train in it and insert it into my presentation.
Once the image is on my slide, I can right mouse click on it and choose "Save as Picture"
I'll save that as a WMF file and load it up into Adobe Illustrator.
Using the best Illustrator Plug-in ever, I can export this graphic to XAML.
And here is the file in Blend:
Next up: "What if I don't have Illustrator?"