XAML Unleashed

Manual Animations

Of course, even with all the fancy animation support discussed in this chapter, nothing prevents you from animating the old-fashioned way. The classic way to implement animations such as the ones in this chapter is to set up a timer and a callback function that is periodically called based on the frequency of the timer. Inside the callback function, you can manually update the target property (doing a little math to determine the current value based on the elapsed time) until it reaches the final value. At that point, you can stop the timer and/or remove the event handler.

Thanks to the retained-mode graphics model, this approach doesn’t take much work. All the XAML-based frameworks even have their own DispatcherTimer class ...