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 D. Using snippets

Here we give an example of snippet usage by showing how to create a dependency property within C# code using propdp snippet. (Creating dependency and attached properties in code would be a pain without snippets).

We are going to create a dependency property RotationAngle of type double within the SpinningControl class.

Within that RotationAngle.cs file, move the cursor to the place you want the dependency property to be at and type propdp<tab>.

The snippet will expand into the following text:

       #region MyProperty Dependency Property
        public int MyProperty
        {
            get { return (int)GetValue(MyPropertyProperty); }
            set { SetValue(MyPropertyProperty, value); }
        }

        public static readonly DependencyProperty MyPropertyProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register
        (
            "MyProperty",
            typeof(int),
            typeof(MainPage),
            new PropertyMetadata(0)
        );
        #endregion MyProperty Dependency Property

The changeable strings are selected in orange. Once you change a selectable string, for example, MyProperty to RotationAngle and press Tab, the matching strings will change throughout the entire snippet and the next selectable string will be selected. You should change MyProperty to RotationAngle, int to double, and 0 to 0.0. Once you are done, press Enter to exit the snippet-editing mode. The following is how the resulting code should look:

        #region RotationAngle Dependency Property
        public double RotationAngle
        {
            get { return (double)GetValue(RotationAngleProperty); }
            set { SetValue(RotationAngleProperty, value); }
        }

        public static readonly DependencyProperty RotationAngleProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register
        (
            "RotationAngle",
            typeof(double),
            typeof(SpinningControl),
            new PropertyMetadata(0.0)
        );
        #endregion RotationAngle Dependency Property

Congratulations! You have just created your first dependency property using propdp snippet.