Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5, Second Edition

Animation Types Revisited

You now know the fundamentals of WPF's property animation system—how animations are defined, how they're connected to elements, and how you can control playback with a storyboard. Now is a good time to take a step back and take a closer look at the animation classes for different data types, and consider how you can use them to achieve the effect you want.

The first challenge in creating any animation is choosing the right property to animate. Making the leap between the result you want (for example, an element moving across the window) and the property you need to use (in this case, Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top) isn't always intuitive. Here are a few guidelines:

• If you want to use an animation to make an element appear ...