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

Investigating timelines


Animations require some kind of timing mechanism that is responsible for updating the relevant property values at the right time. In WPF, this timing mechanism is catered for by the abstract Timeline class, which in short, represents a period of time. All of the available animation classes extend this class and add their own animation functionality.

When a Timeline class is used for animations, an internal copy is made and frozen, so that it is immutable. Additionally, a Clock object is created to preserve the runtime timing state of the Timeline object and is responsible for the actual timing of the animated property updates. The Timeline object itself does little other than define the relevant period of time.

The Clock object will be automatically created for us when we define a Storyboard object, or call one of the Animatable.BeginAnimation methods. Note that we do not typically need to concern ourselves with these Clock objects directly, but it can be helpful to...