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)

Animating navigation panels


Almost any application provides a way to switch (navigate) between different screens. Good navigation functionality should give the users ideas of whether it was a forward or backward movement, and give hints of how to move to the previously shown screens. This section describes ways of creating intuitive navigation functionality using animations.

Let's assume that we are moving from screen to screen mostly in a bidirectional way either forward (to the right) or backwards (to the left). Under a forward move, it will make sense to show the new panel coming from the right and the old panel disappearing on the left-hand side of the application. Under a backward movement, the panels will move in the opposite direction. A more involved animation can result in a page-like movement with the previous page being flipped away, and a new page turned open for the view.

The NavigationAnimations.sln sample shows how to create such animations. The sample is built around TransitioningContentControl...