Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: Sheridan Yuen

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation is rich in possibilities when it comes to delivering an excellent user experience. This book will show you how to build professional-grade applications that look great and work smoothly. We start by providing you with a foundation of knowledge to improve your workflow – this includes teaching you how to build the base layer of the application, which will support all that comes after it. We’ll also cover the useful details of data binding. Next, we cover the user interface and show you how to get the most out of the built-in and custom WPF controls. The final section of the book demonstrates ways to polish your applications, from adding practical animations and data validation to improving application performance. The book ends with a tutorial on how to deploy your applications and outlines potential ways to apply your new-found knowledge so you can put it to use right away.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Telling stories


While the various animation classes that extend the Timeline class can be used to animate control properties directly in code, in order to declare and trigger animations using XAML alone, we need to use the Storyboard class. This is what is known as a container timeline, as it extends the abstract TimelineGroup class that enables it to contain child timelines.

Another container timeline class that the Storyboard class extends is the ParallelTimeline class and these classes enable us to group child timelines and to set properties on them as a group. When creating more complex animations, if all we need to do is to delay the start of a group of child timelines, we should use the ParallelTimeline class rather than the Storyboard class, as it is more efficient.

We could rewrite our earlier BeginTime example to use a ParallelTimeline element to delay the start of our last two timelines. Let's see what that might look like.

<Storyboard> 
  <DoubleAnimation Storyboard...