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)

Silverlight 5 three-dimensional functionality


Silverlight 5 introduced real 3D capabilities via access to a simplified version of XNA. Using this functionality one can build real complex 3D models of triangles, and create vertex and pixel shaders utilizing the full power of GPU to display them.

There are some shortcomings, however, to the new functionality provided. They are as follows:

  • It is not multiplatform – it will only run on Windows (though it is multi-browser).

  • If run within a browser, the client will be required to allow the blocked display drivers for that website and this might be a nuisance if you want your 3D animations to be widely available.

  • The 3D code is essentially not part of the Silverlight framework. It is standalone functionality and the developer needs to spend some extra time and effort in order to make it interact properly with the rest of the Silverlight application.

3D models

3D models usually consist of triangles of different sizes. If the model looks smooth, this means...