I have seen a bunch of flash advertisements that let you draw on the ad, just like I have been doing with embedded winforms controls and now with Silverlight.

But there's something they all have that I couldn't figure out how to get at (but read on, because I finally did!) - a big honkin' pen or pencil "cursor"!

...and the one that breaks my heart the most, is the one for the Lenovo ThinkPad..

When working in Expression, in a Silverlight 1.0 Javascript project, the properties window tells me there are a lot of cursor options, which really teased me:

When I try to use the Pen cursor, I get run time errors telling me there is no such enumeration.

When coding XAML in Visual Studio, intellisense shows me the real list:

Finally it dawned on me. Duh. This wasn't a cursor it was an image and I've seen it being used in the Silverlight Ink Tattoo Studio demo.

So I downloaded the demo and looked to see how it was done - oh so simple. Just move the image position in the MouseMove event.

function InkPresenterMouseMovewithPen(sender,args)
{
if (newStroke != null)
{
newStroke.StylusPoints.AddStylusPoints(args.GetStylusPoints(inkPresenter));
var pen= sender.findname("pen");
pen["Canvas.Left"] = args.getPosition(null).x - 10
pen["Canvas.Top"] = args.getPosition(null).y - 150;
}
}

I then found a stylus image (thank you Wacom), and did a somewhat crappy, but acceptable for experimentation, job of clipping it and voila:

I've updated a few of the pages on my SilverlightInk tests to use the pen so go check it out!

Hmm, maybe now I go into business designing lucrative yet aggravating web ads.