Book Image

Instant Silverlight 5 Animation

By : Nick Polyak
Book Image

Instant Silverlight 5 Animation

By: Nick Polyak

Overview of this book

Silverlight is a Web technology that allows you to create both large business applications and little ads for your web page. Silverlight's main advantage is the ability to create rich UIs easily. In this book we will show how to build animations for different types of Silverlight applications in order to create great user experience."Instant Silverlight 5 Animation" is a practical guide to creating great user experiences in Silverlight. This book will clear Silverlight/WPF concepts needed for creating animations as well as practical examples of creating animations that will help you become an efficient developer for creating animations with Silverlight.This book provides a number of hands on examples of creating Silverlight animations in order to improve the user experience whether you are building a Silverlight Business application or a Silverlight banner ad. We also talk about ways to integrate Silverlight animations with business logic quickly and in the least invasive way. This book can be of help to both beginners and advanced developers. It starts talking about Silverlight concepts like dependency/attached properties and bindings. Then it goes into nitty-gritty detail of creating different animations for different application types. We explain how to animate custom controls, page navigation, how to imitate animation of random processes like fire or moving clouds. We talk about creating 3-D animations and building banner ads for your web page. Every concept, we describe in this book, is supported by small, detailed and easy to understand samples.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Appendix A. Creating and starting a Silverlight project

The following steps will aid you in creating and starting a Silverlight project:

  1. Open Visual Studio 2010.

  2. Choose File | New | Project menu item.

  3. Choose Silverlight Application as a project type, choose the location in which you want to have this project, and choose the project name to be SpinningControlSample.

  4. Press the OK button

  5. On the oncoming screen, press the OK button again.

You have just created a Silverlight application project. In fact, you can see two projects created – an ASP project hosting the Silverlight application called SpinningControlSample.Web (which we touch only very lightly in this book) and the Silverlight 5 project SpinningControlSample.

One can run the application within Visual Studio debugger, by choosing Debug | Start Debugging menu item.

The Silverlight 5 project, SpinningControlSample, is where all the Silverlight work takes place. Building this project produces a Silverlight application deployment file called SpinningControlSample.xap. During the build, this XAP file is copied under the ClientBin folder of the ASP project.

The ASP project SpinningControlSample.web is only used for testing Silverlight applications. It provides ASP and HTML test files SpinningControlSample.aspx and SpinningControlSample.html. One can start the Silverlight application by right-clicking on any of these two files within the Solution Explorer window and choosing the Run in Browser option.