Essential Silverlight 3

11. Effects

SILVERLIGHT 3 ADDS new effects including blur, drop shadow, and custom pixel shaders. For example, you can apply a drop shadow to some text, a blur to simulate motion blur, or create a custom water effect.

This chapter will describe the following:

• The Silverlight effect design principles

• How to use built-in effects

• How to define custom pixel-based effects

• How Silverlight effects work “under the hood”

Effect Principles

The design principles of Silverlight effects include the following:

• Good performance for real-time animation

• Basic built-in effects

Real-Time Speed

Silverlight 3 introduces a pixel shader API (application programming interface) tuned for real-time scenarios such as the use of custom effects with animation. ...