WPF Reflections » VS 2008

WPF Animations – PointAnimationUsingKeyFrames

MarkWPF — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:38:06 +0000

Another key aspect to WPF animations is the ability to specify point movements.
What do I mean by that?
Well a point can be defined as a x and a y co-ordinate, and a movement is simply an animation.

What is key to this though, is that it enables you to easily animate shapes along a specified set of co-ordinates.
Try to imagine doing that in MFC!

Here is an example of moving a circle along a series of co-ordinates:

WPF Animations – KeyFrame animations

MarkWPF — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:34:51 +0000

With WPF animations, as well as linear ones you can also have keyframe animations.

What are keyframe animations?
Well, they allow you to control the animation changes of state completely.
You specify all of the steps, by providing a value and a time that that frame pertains to.

An example should help. Here is a sting animation (yes ) that has a number of key frames specifying different strings:

WPF Animations – RepeatBehaviour property

MarkWPF — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:59:30 +0000

The RepeatBehaviour property allows you to specify how long the animation will repeat.

You can do this either as a TimeSpan or you can choose to specify Forever.

If you specify Forever, funnily enough it repeats the animation and carries on repeating it.

If however you specify a TimeSpan, you can choose a multiple of the duration or a fraction.

In the following example, the top ball repeats 1 and a half times and the bottom one forever:

WPF Animations – FillBehaviour property

MarkWPF — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:29:30 +0000

FillBehaviour is a handy little property when you are doing animations.
It specifies what happens when the animation ends.

It’s actually an enum, and you can specify the following values:

HoldEnd
Stop

HoldEnd will keep the ending value of the animation, whereas Stop will revert back to the original value.
That’s a somewhat bizarre naming in my opinion.
Also, I assume that there are new values expected in the future.

In the following example , two circles move across the screen a bit.
Notice how I use a Canvas in order to specify the Left property for the circles and also the syntax for specifying them in the animations.

The top circle stays where the animation finished, whereas the bottom one goes back to the original value:

WPF Animations – Slow down then speed up

MarkWPF — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:15:35 +0000

One thing that struck me when I was first looking at the AccelerationRatio and DecelerationRatio properties in animations, was whether they could be combined to give the animation a double wobble?!?

Of course is the answer.
In the following example, observe how the bottom ellipse is out of step with the top ellipse.

The bottom ellipse is having an acceleration factor and a deceleration factor applied to it, which gives it a curved animation:

WPF – where were the announcements?

MarkWPF — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:52:51 +0000

Well TechEd 2008 has come and gone (USA version anyway)

Where were the announcements about new things for WPF?

There was a new beta for Silverlight (Beta 2), which is good as I believe Silverlight will be a great thing for web development

I was hoping there might be something about MVC and composite client for WPF.
If you remember, this was called Acropolis before being ‘folded’ into mainstream VS development

I hope I’m wrong and there is much more to come , maybe at PDC
The long awaited paging grid might be useful

Using Document Outline in VS2008 with WPF

MarkWPF — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:02:27 +0000

I have recently rediscovered Document Outline in VS2008.

It was something that I relegated, in my head at least, to the world of web

However, I thought about a week ago – wouldn’t it be very handy if it showed me my complex xaml in a tree.
Lo and behold it did, andI could click on each node and go straight to the relevant DataTemplate

It was a nice and clean way to navigate the page, and dare I say it, easier than using Blend.
Obviously Blend has a lot of great features not in VS2008, but is a bit designer like for me sometimes