Windows® Phone 7 Application Development 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 21. Using Transforms and Animations

In this lesson you will learn about animations and how to use them. You'll learn how to animate transforms, and how to apply easing to your animations. You will also learn how to use Key Frames to animate using more than two target values.

ANIMATIONS

Animation is the process of cycling through a series of drawings or images quickly enough that it appears the objects in those drawings or images are moving. In Silverlight you can apply animations to different properties of an object, making that object appear to change or move.

Using Silverlight you can perform animations on a property whose value is of the type Double, Color, or Point. If the animation will require only two sets of values (a beginning and an ending value), the animation can be applied using one of the following:

• DoubleAnimation

• ColorAnimation

• PointAnimation

If, however, you want to apply sets of values, you will need to use key frame animation. This enables you, for instance, to change the color of a shape from white to red, then from red to yellow, then from yellow to green.

Adding an Animation

There are three parts to the process of creating and applying an animation:

1. Create the storyboard.

2. Create the animation.

3. Start the animation using an event.

Creating the Storyboard

The storyboard is the container that holds your animations. It can hold one or more. To make the storyboard available to all controls on the page, place the following code inside the opening and closing Grid tags for ...