Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 18. Working with Animations in Silverlight

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Performing storyboard animation

• Creating complex animations using keyframes

• Rendering animations with the CompositionTarget.Rendering event

• Animating sprites

As software becomes a greater part of our lives, our experience with it becomes ever more important. Part of this experience can mean adding animation to applications. From Silverlight-based games to basic Line-of-Business applications, Silverlight includes a variety of ways you can add animation to an application.

This chapter looks at the animation capabilities available in Silverlight and the support provided by Visual Studio and Expression Blend to create animations both in XAML and in code. You learn how to use the Storyboard and Animation objects to create basic and keyframe animations, using Expression Blend to configure them. You also review more advanced techniques such CompositionTarget rendering.

Note that although this chapter provides information on animation techniques that can be useful for creating Silverlight games, it is not intended to be a complete guide for creating games and game animations. For more information on creating games, check out the Wrox title Professional XNA Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360 and Windows with XNA Game Studio 2.0, 2nd Edition by Benjamin Nitschke (Wiley, 2008). Additionally, you can find information specific to creating Silverlight-based games, including leveraging the XNA framework to build Silverlight ...