Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF. Download the latest version from http://artefactanimator.codeplex.com/.

Inspired by the Flash community and forged out of frustration, Artefact Animator brings to WPF and Silverlight what Tweener has done for Flash. If you’ve ever tried to get into animation in C# you’ll soon realize there are way too many steps to get you where you need to be. The consequences are that developers don’t love to animate UI and designers are limited by what they can animate when working with dynamic content.

via http://www.artefactgroup.com/blog/2010/04/artefact-animator-live-and-open-source-for-silverlight-and-wpf/

This issue came up a while ago, but after getting deeper into C# I’ve now been able to track down the answer.

The problem involved loading a dynamic flash file into C# on the fly while still being able to load a default in its absence. You could of course use an XML file but then you would just have to edit it each time you used a different path – lame.

So this solution allows for you to drag a file/files onto an application’s icon, and retrieve a list of those dropped items. If it can’t find your file extension in the argument’s array it’ll return the path to your default file.

public String getSWFPath ( )
{
    String[] arguments = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();
    if (arguments.Length > 0)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < arguments.Length; i++)
        {
            String arg = arguments[i];
            if ( arg.IndexOf(".swf") >= 0 ) return arg;
        }
    }

    // DEFAULT PATH
    return Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + “default.swf”;
}

The best part about this is just how easy it is to get that list.

String[] arguments = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();

One thing to keep in mind ( at least for me ) was that the first array element is a reference to the application being launched. If you drop multiple files I couldn’t tell if they were in any specific order, so I chose to loop through the array instead of picking a consistent element index.